Two former Hillary Clinton campaign pollsters disagree about whether President Obama’s call for higher taxes on the most affluent will help or hurt him among upper middle class white voters. Geoff Carin isn’t worried:
“This label of populism ignores the reality of the conversation that’s going on and the positions that President Obama represents in the debate,” Garin said. “You know, it’s only about 75 percent of the public that supports a millionaire’s tax. The Republicans can have the other 25 percent. We’ll take the 75.”
Mark Penn has the opposite opinion.
But Penn, along with some other skeptics, remains convinced that such poll numbers are transitory – and that when Republicans push back, Obama’s drive for higher taxes on the rich will eventually bite him in places like the suburbs of Philadelphia, Northern Virginia and the suburban counties ringing Denver – all places he can’t afford to lose. “The people who vote on taxes,” Penn bluntly insists, “are the people who pay them.”
It’s true that polls can be highly misleading when they ask about subjects in a vacuum. What might poll well in the abstract can become quite unpopular once it faces a well-financed and highly-coordinated opposition campaign. Yet, it’s hard to argue that taxing millionaires isn’t more popular than slashing Medicare and Social Security. Mark Penn is fulfilling his professional role as a concern troll for the Democratic Party.
I’m not even sure that Mark Penn has correctly identified the pivot-point of the electorate. John McCain got a higher percentage of the white vote in 2008 than George W, Bush got in 2000, but Bush’s election ended in a tie and McCain was crushed. Did McCain lose because white suburbanites turned against him? What is the evidence to support that contention? It seems like he probably got at least as big a percentage of affluent white suburban voters as Bush. What McCain didn’t get was other groups.
Latino Vote
Bush 2000: 35%
Bush 2004: 44%
McCain 2008:31%
Black Vote
Bush 2000: 10%
Bush 2004: 11%
McCain 2008:4%
Age 18-29
Bush 2000: 46%
Bush 2004: 45%
McCain 2008:32%
It seems to me that the Republicans have two choices. They can try to get a bigger percentage of the white vote or they can work on reversing their downward trend with Latinos and young voters. Or, they can try to do both, to the degree they are not mutually exclusive. As for Obama, if he gets the same percentages of voters that he got last time, his win will be even larger because the country is becoming less white (pdf). For example, between 2000 and 2010, both the Latino and Asian populations grew by 43%, while the white population grew by 1.2%.
There also is a likely fallacy in Mark Penn’s thinking. If Obama loses a few liberal-minded but tax-averse suburban white voters, he’ll probably gain a near-equal or even greater number of middle to low income white voters who respond to his economic populism. Anyone who is taking on the rich people who crashed our economy and now refuse to pay any taxes to fix the problem is going to be more popular than Mitt Freaking Romney.