On Wed, 3 May 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> In Bartel's original paper -- where he divides the electorate into third by
>> income -- he says that the lower third -- the working class in his
>> definition -- mainly cares about economic issues and holds economic policy
>> preferences that are to the left of the other two classes. So by that
>> analysis, going left on the economy should have the potential to pull in
>> lots of votes.
>
> New votes? I doubt it; they're probably voting Dem already.
No, that's just it -- they have more non-voters than the other two thirds. They always have. And that's just what you want for a GOTV target: people who are disposed to vote for you but aren't voting.
And since he breaks the pop into three equal thirds in population terms, that means the *most* Dem voters are there, waiting to be tapped.
> So if the middle third is indifferent and the top third hostile, they've
> got little to gain with this strategy.
Again, if you take Bartels analysis seriously, this isn't the picture you see. He says the top two thirds are pretty indistinguishable in their economic preferences. But also in the fact that economic preferences are not their prime movers -- rather social preferences are.
That's the key: for the lower third, according to Bartels, economic preferences are their prime movers. And for the upper two thirds, social preferences are. So you could pander to both, even though their views are opposed, because they have different priorities.
All this depends on this depends on his analysis being right of course. I have no problems if you overthrow it; I can see several reasonable grounds for doing so, not least because this basic 3 thirds model doesn't line up even roughly with your own ideas of what proportion of the pop should be in each class.
But if you cite him as evidence, then I think the conclusion on this question particular question would have to be the opposite -- that yes, more left economics (the way Bartels defines it) would be attractive to the working class (as he defines it) and that there there are a lot of unmined votes there to be gotten.
Michael