America is divided as never before on class, gender, race and economic lines – but voters agree on the big issue
Mitt and Ann Romney and Barack and Michelle Obama after the final televised presidential debate Photo: Reuters
By Niall Ferguson
8:25PM GMT 02 Nov 2012 211
211 Comments
It may turn out to be the moment that defined this presidential election. It was back in May, at a fundraising event in Boca Raton, Florida, that Mitt Romney used the fateful words “47 per cent”.
“There are,” he told his audience, “47 per cent of the people who… are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it – that that’s an entitlement. And [they believe] the government should give it to them.”
Confident that everyone present belonged firmly in the top 1 per cent income bracket – since they had each paid $50,000 for the privilege of breaking bread with the Republican presidential nominee – Romney pulled no punches. This 47 per cent, he went on, “would vote for this president no matter what ... These are people who pay no income tax ... [My] job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
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Surreptitiously filmed and released by the ultra-liberal Mother Jones website, Romney’s remarks were manna from heaven for Democrats. The only puzzle was why President Obama waited until the second of the three presidential debates to play what many of his supporters saw as a trump card.
It does indeed come to down to percentages – and 47 per cent looks to be the magic number. According to the average of polls calculated by the Real Clear Politics website, the president is going to get 47.1 per cent of the popular vote when the results are in some time next Wednesday. The surprising thing is that Mitt Romney is expected to get more: 47.9 per cent.
For a man the Democrats like to portray as the candidate of the 1 per cent, Mr Romney is proving to be remarkably popular.
Presidential elections are seldom this close. We all remember the dead heat of 12 years ago, when Al Gore won the popular vote, but lost in the electoral college, despite the fact that a state-wide recount in Florida – had he persuaded the courts to allow one – might have handed him that state’s electoral votes and the presidency. Could 2012 be a repeat of 2000? Many pundits think so.
If the final result does turn out to be 47-47, with victory going to whichever candidate can sway the undecided in fewer than a dozen states, what will that say about America?
The obvious answer is that this must be a deeply divided society. The pundits will point to maps starkly split between “blue” Democratic coasts and “red” Republican heartlands. They will cite evidence that Congressional voting and campaigning has never been so polarised. And anyone who watched the second debate – when the two candidates circled one another as if auditioning for Fight Club – will be tempted to agree.
Can a country be anything other than deeply divided when a pro-Obama organisation (The Agenda Project) makes a TV ad showing a Paul Ryan lookalike literally tipping an old lady out of her wheelchair and over a cliff?
By definition, a country that splits evenly between two opposing political parties is divided. But how deep is that division? Does it reflect profound social cleavages of the kind that have produced strife – even civil war – in the past?
To answer those questions, let’s go back to Mitt Romney’s 47 per cent. Although he subsequently disavowed his own statement, he was actually not far wrong. A slightly higher proportion of Americans – 49 per cent – live in a household that receives some kind of government benefit, compared to 30 per cent in 1983. Around 38 per cent rely on the government for healthcare, mostly Medicare (26 per cent) and Medicaid (15 per cent). No fewer than 15 per cent are on food stamps, and around 4 per cent receive government assistance with their rent.
Moreover, there is a substantial overlap between these recipients of government money and the 46 per cent of people who don’t pay any income tax. It wasn’t smart of Romney to say these people “believe that they are victims”, or to imply that they don’t pay any tax. But as a matter of fact it is undeniable that dependency on government transfer payments is far higher today than 30 years ago.
So is America divided along class lines? The answer, according to Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart, published to critical acclaim this year, is yes. In his words, there are now two “classes that diverge on core behaviours and values – classes that barely recognise their underlying American kinship”. Down at the bottom of the social heap is an under-educated, under-achieving underclass, among whom marriage has declined, along with the work ethic, religious observance and a sense of community.
At the top, by contrast, you’ll find the “cognitive elite”: educated at Ivy League colleges, inter-married and stinking rich. Denounced by last year’s Occupy Wall Street movement as “the 1 per cent”, these people have almost no contact with their wretched fellow citizens in the generic dump Murray calls “Fishtown”.
But here’s the catch. These class divisions in no way match the party political divisions that will decide next week’s election. As Murray points out, the elite who inhabit the “SuperZips” (wealthy postal codes) are very often politically liberal; whereas many poor Americans are staunchly conservative.
If class division is not the key to this election, could race be? Well, yes and no. Four years ago, black voters turned out in unprecedented numbers for the president.
But there is no guarantee that they will be anything so enthusiastic this time around. This recession has hit young people hard – and it has hit young African-Americans harder than almost anybody. It is perfectly possible that the outcome in Ohio could be determined by African-Americans not voting.
Even racial division may not provide the key to this election. How about the battle of the sexes? Because the Obama campaign – with help from rogue Republican candidates – has managed to brand the Romney-Ryan ticket as anti-feminist (as if their number one priority is to get the Supreme Court to ban abortion), women are widely seen as Obama’s most dependable supporters.
In reality, it’s more of a Guy Thing. According to Gallup, Romney leads Obama by 14 points among men (57 to 43), whereas Obama and John McCain were tied among men in the final polls of 2008. Obama currently leads Romney by 8 percentage points among women, whereas he led McCain by 14 points. The striking thing here is the swings we are seeing. If American politics have become “gendered”, it’s a pretty recent phenomenon.
In any case, the evidence points to a broad consensus among Americans – regardless of class, race or sex – about what is at issue in this election. The economy is number one. Unemployment – in other words, the economy – is number two. And the budget deficit – more economy – is number three. To a remarkable extent, people agree about this. What they disagree about is which of the two candidates is better able to address their economic concerns.
To be precise, those not voting out of habit (“We’ve always been Republicans/Democrats”) have to answer two tricky questions. First, could Barack Obama have done a better job, considering how big the economic mess was that he inherited? Second, can Mitt Romney do a better job than Obama over the next four years?
The Romney campaign believed their man could win by answering question one with a resounding Yes. For months, Republicans have reeled off statistics designed to show how pathetic the recovery has been. Rather than defend the president’s economic record, the Obama campaign opted instead to answer question two with a resounding No. They have waged a sustained campaign of character assassination against Romney. The polling data suggest that neither strategy has been decisive. Voters understand that an economic miracle was never on the cards. They also understand that Romney is not a fiend in human form.
What unites the 47 per cent who will probably vote for Obama is not class or race or the benefits they receive or the income tax they don’t pay. It’s a fundamental acceptance of the president’s core claim that government can provide an answer to their problems. What unites the 47 per cent who will probably vote for Romney is a fundamental suspicion of that claim.
However, from where I am sitting both sides seem to be debating symptoms, not underlying causes. The growth of the debt is just a reflection of the fundamental breakdown we have witnessed in the contract between the generations. The sluggish economy is, in turn, a reflection of the administration’s penchant for over-complex regulation, and the tendency for each new law to generate uncountable billing hours for hordes of lawyers. The evidence of institutional degeneration is striking. The World Economic Forum gives the US shockingly bad scores for the quality of legal institutions. The World Bank data on governance show a marked decline since the late 1990s. Harvard Business School alumni are full of gloom about the effectiveness of the political system, the quality of education and the complexity of the tax code.
Of course, these are the issues that don’t get discussed in presidential election campaigns. But as I travel around this extraordinary country, I am struck by how many people recognise the problems I am describing here.
In a few days’ time, we shall see which of the men Americans believe is better equipped to address them. For my part, I hope they will pick the challenger. But whoever wins 47 per cent of the vote – and perhaps they both will – should never forget: the real division is one of opinion, not of class, race or sex.
Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard. His latest book, 'The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die’, (Penguin), is available from Telegraph Books at £14.99 + £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515, or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
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Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9651384/The-United-States-a-struggling-nation-that-is-polls-apart.html
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