What I found interesting was Daley, Cowan and Hatalsky's diagnosius of swing voters' view on the economy. They found that voters were more anxious than angry about the economy. Where Sanders and Occupy-esque activist are trying to stoke anger about the economy being rigged to favor the so-called 1%, swing voters don't see the economy as rigged against them. Instead they are anxious about the qualitative changes that have occured in how the economy works. As the authors put it:
So what are middle-class voters looking for in an economic platform? An agenda that makes these huge, scary economic forces work for the middle class, not against them. When Kodak went under, 145,000 jobs disappeared—not because of unfairness but because we take pictures on our iPhones. Airbnb was just a twinkle in someone’s eye five years ago. Next year, it will serve more visitors than the entire Hilton chain but employ fewer people than North Dakota has hotel desk clerks. Borders Books has all but disappeared because of the Kindle; 300,000 sales jobs have vanished thanks to Amazon. People live in this world; they’re part of it, and they know it’s not because a handful of rich guys are pulling the strings.
Since that is the world voters see, the main populist economic ideas seem aimed at the wrong targets and tethered to a different time. Expand Social Security for everyone? That would cost trillions and confer a huge share of its benefits to wealthy, married senior couples. Single-payer health care? That comes with a $15 trillion price tag, a giant increase in middle class taxes, and another huge government program. Doubling the minimum wage to $15? All Democrats want to raise it, but a bump of nearly $8 nationwide would cost far too many jobs. All told, core populist policies would increase taxes on someone earning $60,000 by over five thousand dollars. And not a single one of these ideas addresses the middle class anxieties that are driven by the modern economy.
That’s why populist economic policies may poll well in the abstract, but most voters feel they do little to address their own concerns. In our focus groups, they felt that the populist proposals simply were not relevant to their own lives. Over and over, we heard variations on this: “Democrats are for the poor; Republicans are for the rich. No one fights for the middle class.” And tellingly, though every voter in our groups supported raising the minimum wage, not a single one thought it would directly help them or their family.
If voters believe the biggest challenge they face is navigating a new economy, then Democrats must have an agenda to meet that challenge. Voters know we can’t go back to the way things were. As one female swing voter from the Northeast said it, “I do not think we will ever ‘recover’ to the same place or economy we were before.” A male swing voter from Virginia described it this way: “The printing industry is not going to be what it’s going to be anymore, and soon everybody starts moving towards something else, transitioning towards something else, the better it’s going to be.”
American voters see a brave new economic world. They want a real path to the skills, jobs, and wages they need to succeed, and a modern set of policy ideas made for this irreversible age of globalization and technological change.The authors move on to analyze Democratic electoral chances but I think the above paragraphs lay out an interesting diagnosis of voter views. It is interesting because the views described by the authors are exactly the views I would say voters should have based on everything I know about the modern global economy. So, if the authors' analysis is correct, voters appear to be fairly prescient.
Of course, this begs the question of why politicians aren't equally prescient.
