How Working-Class White Voters Became the GOPs Foundation

Published

3 years ago

March 26, 2023

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The escalating confrontation between the parties over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with older and lower-income voters who rely on the social programs that the GOP wants to cut.

A much larger share of Republican than Democratic House members represent districts where seniors exceed their share of the national population, census data show. Republicans are also more likely to represent districts where the median income trails the national level, or the proportion of people without health insurance is greater than in the nation overall.

House Republicans, in their ongoing struggle with President Joe Biden over raising the debt ceiling, have signaled they will push for sweeping reductions in domestic social programs, likely including Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, the principal federal programs providing health care for working-age adults. And while House Republicans appear to have backed away from pursuing reductions in Social Security and Medicare, the conservative Republican Study Committee has set a long-term goal of cutting and partially privatizing both programs.

Ruy Teixeira: Democrats long goodbye to the working class

The fact that so many House Republicans feel safe advancing these proposals in districts with such extensive economic need testifies to the power of what Ive called the class inversion in American politics: the growing tendency of voters to divide between the parties based on cultural attitudes, rather than class interests. That dynamic has simultaneously allowed House Democrats to gain in more socially liberal, affluent, metropolitan areas and House Republicans to consolidate their hold over more culturally conservative, economically hardscrabble, nonurban areas.

Yesterday, Biden forcefully reiterated his charge that Republicans would shred the safety net at a White House ceremony commemorating the 13th anniversary of Barack Obama signing the ACA into law. An extended battle between House Republicans and Biden this spring and summer over the safety net may test whether any economic argument can allow Democrats to break through the cultural resistance that fortifies Republican control of these downscale districts.

While Republicans have gained in some areas primarily around culturally and racially infused disputes such as those over crime and immigration, a struggle over spending priorities will inevitably highlight that their policies on these bread-and-butter issues remain diametrically opposed to the economic interest of much of their base, Paul Pierson, a political scientist at UC Berkeley and a co-author of Let Them Eat Tweets, told me.

As I reported last week, to understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureaus American Community Survey.

That analysis inverts many traditional assumptions, even within the parties themselves, about whose voters rely on the social safety net. There has been a massive transformation of the coalitions, Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.

Democrats, who led the legislative efforts to create Social Security under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Medicare under Lyndon B. Johnson, have long thought of themselves as the party of seniors. But today, Republicans represent 141 of the 215 House districts where adults aged 65 and older exceed their 16 percent share of the national population, while Democrats hold a clear majority of seats in districts with fewer seniors than average, according to the Equity Research Institute analysis.

Republicans now also control most of the House seats in which the median income trails the national level of nearly $65,000 annually. Republicans hold 152 of the 237 seats in that category. Democrats, in turn, hold 128 of the 198 seats where the median income exceeds the national level.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Republicans hold a clear majority of the districts where the share of residents who lack health insurance exceeds the national level of 9 percent. The GOP now holds 110 of those 185 highly uninsured seats. Democrats control 138 of the 250 seats with fewer uninsured than the nation overall.

Equally revealing is to examine what share of each partys total strength in the House these seats represent. From that angle, the parties offer almost mirror-image profiles. About two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts with more seniors than the national level, while about two-thirds of Democrats represent districts with fewer of them. Roughly two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts where the median income lags the national level, while three-fifths of Democrats hold seats where incomes surpass it. Almost exactly half of Republicans, compared with only about one-third of Democrats, represent districts with an unusually high concentration of people lacking health insurance.

The economically vulnerable districts that each side holds also present a stark demographic contrast. Low-income Democratic seats tend to be in urban centers with large nonwhite populations. In more than three-fourths of the Democratic seats with a median income below the national level, and in virtually all of the Democratic districts with more uninsured people than average, the minority share of the population is also higher than the national average.

Some low-income Republican districts also have large minority populations, particularly in Texas and Florida, where the GOP has made inroads into culturally conservative Latino communities. But mostly the low-income GOP seats are centered on working-class white areas, many of them outside metropolitan areas.

Read: Are Latinos really realigning toward Republicans?

In the 141 seats Republicans hold with more seniors than the national average, white residents exceed their national share of the population in 127 of them. Likewise, white residents surpass their share of the national population in more than four-fifths of the Republican-held districts that lag the median income. Nearly half of House Republicans represent districts in which all three things are true: They have more seniors than the national level, more white residents than the national level, and a lower median income than the national level.

All of this reflects how working-class white voters, many of them financially squeezed, have become the unquestioned foundation of the GOPs coalition at every level, from the House through presidential elections.

Biden is laying siege to those voters with a strategy of deemphasizing cultural disputes and stressing kitchen-table economic benefits. Democrats really are making appeals to these districts in a big way, Pierson said. Most of that infrastructure and climate [spending] is going to go on in red states. There really is a big effort to say, We are going to use policy to try to make our electoral coalition bigger.

A key element of Bidens courtship of these voters is defending the social safety net, especially Social Security and Medicare. The presidents repeated rejection of reductions in those programs, combined with former President Donald Trumps opposition to potential cuts, has resulted in the most obvious concession by House Republicans to their evolving electoral base: public declarations by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other leaders that they will not target Social Security and Medicare in the cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit this summer.

Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cutswhile also precluding tax increaseswill force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs that many voters in blu-collar Republican districts rely on, potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.

Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit, Blendon said. The people voting Republican in those districts dont see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.

The one risk for Republicans in such areas, he noted, would be if voters conclude that they present a genuine threat to Social Security and Medicare. Even most conservative voters strongly favor those programs, Blendon told me, primarily because they view them as an earned benefit that workers have contributed to during their lifetime. If the GOP seriously pushes ideas such as converting Medicare into a voucher program, or diverting part of Social Security revenue into private investment accounts, then in districts with a lot of older people, they are going to get in trouble, Blendon said.

Pastor, the director of the Equity Research Institute, also believes that current Democratic arguments targeted at older and non-college-educated white voters that they are voting against their interests economically are unlikely to succeed. The problem, he says, is that those arguments dont directly address the way many voters also define their interests to include cultural and racial dynamics. Because Republican strength in these older, predominantly white, financially stressed districts is rooted largely in the alienation of white voters who fear the country is shifting on them demographically, Democrats must ultimately make a more explicit case to those voters about how all Americans can benefit from a more diverse and inclusive society, Pastor said. The Democratic Party needs to figure out how to talk more effectively about race and racismnot try to ignore it, but try to inoculate people against it, he said.

Read: The four quadrants of American politics

Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, notes that the majority of voters, including seniors, support Bidens approach to preserving the safety net for retirees: In a recent national survey, his group found that voters were nearly four times as likely to support stabilizing Medicare by raising taxes on the affluent rather than cutting benefits. There is quite a bit of economically populist appetite even among Republicans for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, Bennett told me. Even Medicaid, once seen as a program for the poor, now draws widespread support across party lines, he said.

Yet Bennett, too, is cautious about predicting that Republican efforts to cut the safety net will hurt them in districts that highly depend on it. The GOP, Bennett said, is gambling that it can cut programs that benefit the partys lower-income white base and still prevent those voters from defecting to Democrats by stressing other issues like immigration and the culture war.

If Republicans face any internal resistance to sharp cuts in the safety net, in fact, it may be more likely to come from their members who represent socially liberal white-collar districts that dont rely as much on these programs than from their members who represent the culturally conservative blue-collar districts that do depend on them. The Republicans who seem least concerned about targeting the social safety net are those who represent the places that need those programs the most. Thats another telling measure of just how fully the concrete has settled beneath a modern political alignment that revolves more around culture than class.

Business

Is the AI bubble about to burst? If so the consequences could be dire

Published

3 hours ago

December 22, 2025

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Is the AI bubble about to burst? If so the consequences could be dire

The market seems to be content, for now at least, to keep betting big on AI.

While the value of some companies integral to the AI boom like Nvidia, Oracle and Coreweave have seen their value fall since the highs of the mid-2025, the US stockmarket remains dominated by investment in AI.

Of the S&P500 index of leading companies, 75% of returns are thanks to 41 AI stocks. The “magnificent seven” of big tech companies, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple and Tesla, account for 37% of the S&P’s performance.

Such dominance, based almost exclusively on building one kind of AI – Large Language Models is sustaining fears of an AI bubble.

Nonsense, according to the AI titans.

“We are long, long away from that,” Jensen Huang, CEO of AI chip-maker Nvidia and the world’s first $5trn company, told Sky News last month.

Not everyone shares that confidence.

Too much confidence in one way of making AI, which so far hasn’t delivered profits anywhere close to the level of spending, must be testing the nerve of investors wondering where their returns will be.

The consequences of the bubble bursting, could be dire.

“If a few venture capitalists get wiped out, nobody’s gonna be really that sad,” said Gary Marcus, AI scientist and emeritus professor at New York University.

But with a large part of US economic growth this year down to investment in AI, the “blast radius”, could be much greater, said Marcus.

“In the worst case, what happens is the whole economy falls apart, basically. Banks aren’t liquid, we have bailouts, and taxpayers have to pay for it.”

Could that happen?

Well there are some ominous signs.

By one estimate Microsoft, Amazon, Google Meta and Oracle are expected to spend around $1trn on AI by 2026.

Open AI, maker of the first breakthrough Large Language Model ChatGPT, is committing to spend $1.4trn over the coming three years.

But what are investors in those companies getting in return for their investment? So far, not very much.

Take OpenAI, it’s expected to make little more than $20bn in profit in 2025. A lot of money, but nothing like enough to sustain spending of $1.4trn.

The size of the AI boom – or bubble depending on your view – comes down to the way it’s being built.

Computer cities

The AI revolution came in early 2023 when OpenAI released ChatGPT4.

The AI represented a mind-blowing improvement in natural language, computer coding and image generation ability that grew almost entirely out of one advance: Scale

GPT-4 required 3,000 to 10,000 times more computer power – or compute – than its predecessor GPT-2.

To make it smarter, it was trained on far more data. GPT-2 was trained on 1.5 billion “parameters” compared to perhaps 1.8 trillion for GPT-4 – essentially all the text, image and video data on the internet.

The leap in performance was so great, “Artificial General Intelligence” or AGI that rivals humans on most tasks, would come from simply repeating that trick.

And that’s what’s been happening. Demand for frontline GPU chips to train AI soared – and hence the share price of Nvidia which makes them doing the same.

The bulldozers then moved in to build the next generation of mega-data centres to run the chips and make the next generations of AI.

And they moved fast.

Stargate, announced in January by Donald Trump, Open AI’s Sam Altman and other partners, already has two vast data centre buildings in operation.

By mid-2026 the complex in central Texas is expected to cover an area the size of Manhattan’s Central Park.

And already, it’s beginning to look like small fry.

Meta’s $27bn Hyperion data centre being built in Louisiana is closer to the size of Manhattan itself.

The data centre is expected to consume twice as much power as the nearby city of New Orleans.

The rampant increase in power demand is putting a major squeeze on America’s power grid with some data centres having to wait years for grid connections.

A problem for some, but not, say optimists, firms like Microsoft, Meta and Google, with such deep pockets they can build their own power stations.

Once these vast AI brains are built and switched on however, will they print money?

Stale Chips

Unlike other expensive infrastructure like roads, rail or power networks, AI data centres are expected to need constant upgrades.

Investors have good estimates for “depreciation curves” of various types of infrastructure asset. But not so for cutting-edge purpose-built AI data centres which barely existed five years ago.

Nvidia, the leading maker of AI chips, has been releasing new, more powerful processors every year or so. It claims their latest chips will run for three to six years.

But there are doubts.

Fund manager Michael Burry, immortalised in the movie The Big Short, for predicting America’s sub-prime crash, recently announced he was betting against AI stocks.

His reasoning, that AI chips will need replacing every three years and given competition with rivals for the latest chips, perhaps faster than that.

Cooling, switching and wiring systems of data centres also wears down over time and is likely to need replacing within 10 years.

A few months ago, the Economist magazine estimated that if AI chips alone lose their edge every three years, it would reduce the combined value of the five big tech companies by $780bn.

If depreciation rates were two years, that number goes up to $1.6trn.

Factor in that depreciation and it further widens the already colossal gap between their AI spending and likely revenues.

By one estimate, the big tech will need to see $2trn in profit by 2030 to justify their AI costs.

Are people buying it?

And then there’s the question of where the profits are to justify the massive AI investments.

AI adoption is undoubtedly on the rise.

You only have to skim your social media to witness the rise of AI-generated text, images and videos.

Kids are using it for homework, their parents for research, or help composing letters and reports.

But beyond casual use and fantastical cat videos, are people actually profiting from it – and therefore likely to pay enough for it to satisfy trillion-dollar investments?

There’s early signs current AI could revolutionise some markets, like software and drug development, creative industries and online shopping,

And by some measures, the future looks promising, OpenAI claims to have 800 million “weekly active users” across its products, double what it was in February.

However, only 5% of those are paying subscribers.

And when you look at adoption by businesses – where the real money is for Big Tech – things don’t look much better.

According to the US census bureau at the start of 2025, 8-12% of companies said they are starting to use AI to produce goods and services.

For larger companies – with more money to spend on AI perhaps – adoption grew to 14% in June but has fallen to 12% in recent months.

According to analysis by McKinsey, the vast majority of companies are still in the pilot stage of AI rollout or looking at how to scale their use.

In a way, this makes total sense. Generative AI is a new technology, with even the companies building still trying to figure out what it’s best for.

But how long will shareholders be prepared to wait before profits come even close to paying off the investments they’ve made?

Especially, when confidence in the idea that current AI models will only get better is beginning to falter.

Is scaling failing?

Large Language Models are undoubtedly improving.

According to industry “benchmarks”, technical tests that evaluate AI’s ability to perform complex maths, coding or research tasks, performance is tracking the scale of computing power being added. Currently doubling every six months or so.

But on real-world tasks, the evidence is less strong.

LLMs work by making statistical predictions of what answers should be based on their training data, without actually understanding what that data actually “means”.

They struggle with tasks that involve understanding how the world works and learning from it.

Their architecture doesn’t have any kind of long-term memory allowing them to learn what types of data is important and what’s not. Something that human brains do without having to be told.

For that reason, while they make huge improvements on certain tasks, they consistently make the same kind of mistakes, and fail at the same kind of tasks.

“Is the belief that if you just 100x the scale, everything would be transformed? I don’t think that’s true,” Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder of OpenAI told the Dwarkesh Podcast last month.

The AI scientist who helped pioneer ChatGPT, before leaving OpenAI predicted, “it’s back to the age of research again, just with big computers”.

Will those who’ve taken big bets with AI be satisfied with modest future improvements, while they wait for potential customers to figure out how to make AI work for them?

“It’s really just a scaling hypothesis, a guess that this might work. It’s not really working,” said Prof Marcus.

“So you’re spending trillions of dollars, profits are negligible and depreciation is high. It does not make sense. And so then it’s a question of when the market realises that.”

UK

Major incident declared in Shropshire as sinkhole affects canal

Published

3 hours ago

December 22, 2025

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Major incident declared in Shropshire as sinkhole affects canal

A major incident had been declared in Shropshire following reports of a sinkhole affecting a canal in the Chemistry area of Whitchurch.

Emergency services are currently on the scene, and a multi-agency response has been set up, co-ordinated through the Shropshire Tactical Co-ordination Group (TCG).

There are currently no reports of any casualties, and residents are being assisted by the fire service.

A picture seen by Sky News shows a whole section of the canal completely drained of water. Two narrowboats appear to have fallen into the hole and are sitting on the canal bed.

Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service said on X: “Shropshire FRS is responding to a landslip affecting the canal in the Whitchurch area.

“For everyone’s safety, members of the public are kindly asked to remain away from the affected area, including Whitchurch Marina, while crews and partners manage the incident.”

UK

Puppy farming and trail hunting to be banned – but critics warn of ‘war on the countryside’

Published

3 hours ago

December 22, 2025

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Puppy farming and trail hunting to be banned - but critics warn of 'war on the countryside'

Puppy farms, trail hunting and snare traps are all set to be banned under animal welfare reforms being introduced by the government.

Ministers have today unveiled the government’s Animal Welfare Strategy, which also takes aim at other measures seen as cruel, such as shock collars, as well as cages and crates for farm animals.

But while proposals to improve animals’ lives have been welcomed, Labour have been accused of acting like “authoritarian control freaks” for plans to ban trail hunting.

This is the practice that sees an animal scent laid through the countryside, which then allows riders and dogs to ‘hunt’ the smell.

Labour banned fox hunting outright in 2004, but Sir Keir Starmer’s government has suggested trail hunting is now “being used as a smokescreen for hunting” foxes.

Announcing the reforms, Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds said: “This government is delivering the most ambitious animal welfare strategy in a generation.

“Our strategy will raise welfare standards for animals in the home, on the farm and in the wild.”

Under the proposals, puppy farms – large-scale sites where dogs are bred intensively – will be banned.

This is because these farms can see breeding dogs kept in “appalling conditions” and “denied proper care”, resulting in “long-term health issues”, according to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

The strategy has also launched a consultation on banning shock collars, which use electricity to sting pets and prevent them from escaping.

Other proposals include introducing new licences for rescue and rehoming organisations, promoting “responsible” dog ownership and bringing in new restrictions for farms to improve animal welfare.

These will see bans on “confinement systems” such as colony cages for hens and pig-farrowing crates, while requirements will be brought in to spare farmed fish “avoidable pain”.

The use of carbon dioxide to stun pigs will also be addressed, while farmers will be encouraged to choose to rear slower-growing meat chicken breeds.

In order to protect wild animals, snare traps will be banned alongside trail hunting, while restrictions on when hares can be shot will be introduced.

The reforms have been publicly welcomed by multiple animal charities, including the RSPCA, Dogs Trust, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, and World Farming UK, as well as by the supermarket Waitrose.

Thomas Schultz-Jagow, from the RSPCA, called the proposals a “significant step forward” and said they have the potential to improve millions of lives.

He added: “People in the UK love animals, and they want to see governments leading the way to outlaw cruel practices which cause suffering. This strategy leads the way by showing a strong commitment to animal welfare.”

Meanwhile, the Greens have also welcomed it but warned the strategy must have “real teeth”, “clear timescales” and “properly support farmers through the transition and not allow imports that don’t meet UK standards”.

Adrian Ramsay said: “Puppy legislation must end breeding for extreme, unhealthy traits in dogs. The strategy could go further for animals, particularly by ending greyhound racing, as the Welsh Government is doing.”

But the Conservatives have hit out at the strategy, saying it shows Labour “simply doesn’t care about rural Britain”.

Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, said: “While it is good to see the government taking forward Conservative policies to tackle puppy smuggling and livestock worrying, Labour is yet again favouring foreign farmers over British farmers by allowing substandard foreign imports to undercut our already-high welfare standards.”

She also accused Labour of announcing the strategy on the Monday before Christmas “to avoid scrutiny” as “they know that this will be another hammer blow to farming profitability”.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage said: “So now Labour wants to ban trail hunting. You might as well ban walking dogs in the countryside as they chase rabbits, hares, deer and foxes. Labour are authoritarian control freaks.”

The Countryside Alliance, an organisation that promotes rural sport, said: “Why does the government want a war with the countryside?

“Trail hunting supports hundreds of jobs and is central to many rural communities. After its attack on family farms, the government should be focusing on addressing issues that actually help rural communities thrive, rather than pursuing divisive policies that hinder them.”