As Chris Bertram says in comments here, Romney’s main hope of getting away with his claim that 47 per cent of the US population are non-taxpaying moochers is the expectation that very few people will actually regard themselves as part of that 47 per cent. The same calculation is made by those who have pushed this talking point for years such as well-known plagiarist Ben Domenech and general lowlife Erick Erickson. It’s unsurprising that they should think this. After all, they’ve been making this claim, in one form or another for years, going back to the WSJ’s attack on “lucky duckies” in 2002. The claim has been refuted time and again with the points that most of the 47 per cent are workers subject to payroll tax, or retired people, but this refutation hasn’t reached the Fox News audience, many of whom don’t realise they are the moochers being attacked here.

But I don’t think this will help Romney, and the reasons why reflect some important developments in relation to post-truth political discourse in the US.

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For quite a while now (pre-dating Obama, but more frequently since he was elected), I’ve been reading about the Democrats’ troubles with “the white working class”. In some ways, this is unsurprising. In every country with which I’m familiar, a substantial proportion of the working class votes for the more conservative/rightwing party. And, even compared to the most wishy-washy of social democratic and labor parties elsewhere, the Dems aren’t exactly fervent champions of the worker. Still, the Repubs are even worse, so it seemed surprising to read that they regard the white working class as their base. Other things I read (sorry can’t find links now) made things even more puzzling. On the one hand, in the US as elsewhere, higher incomes are correlated with voting for the conservative/rightwing party, which seems to cut against the thesis. On the other hand, I’ve read that the average income of the US working class is the same as that of the population as a whole, which goes against the whole idea of “working class” as I understand it.

All became clear(or, at least, clearer) when I discovered that US political discussion uses two very different (though correlated) concepts of “working class”. The first is the more or less standard one – people who depend on wage labor (normally in manual or low-status service occupations) for their income. The second, specific to the US, and standard in most political polling, is “people without a 4-year college degree”, a class which includes such horny-handed sons and daughters of toil as Bill Gates and Paris Hilton. More prosaically, it includes lots of small business owners, and (since college graduation rates were rising until relative recently), over-represents the old.

Data on US voting patterns is surprisingly scarce, but Andrew Gelman has a big data set confirming the point that Republican voting rises with income. Andrew kindly sent me the data, which classifies voters by education (5 levels), income (5 categories) and race/ethnicity(4), for a total of 100 categories, and gives, for each group the proportion voting Republican. I’ve used this to look at an income-based definition of working class, encompassing everyone with an income less than $40 000. I’m not sure of the exact definition of this variable, but it seems pretty clear that people with income at this level are unlikely to be living on income from capital or a high-status job. To focus on the claim about the white working class, I’ve divided the 100 categories into four roughly equal-sized groups: working class whites (income less than 40K), middle/high income whites with and without college degrees, and all non-whites. Then I’ve looked at how many votes the Republicans got from each group in 2008.

As the pie chart below illustrates, the biggest group in the Republican voting base, and the group with which they do best is that of middle/high income whites without college degrees (the percentage after the group name gives the Republican share of the vote for that group). There’s nothing surprising in this, since all three variables are correlated with Republican voting. It’s the practice of calling this group “working class” that causes the confusion.

Disaggregating, the extreme case is that of high-school educated whites with incomes over $150K, 81.7 per cent of whom supported the Republicans in 2008. They’re a small group of course, but not negligible at about 1 per cent of the sample (155 out of 19170).

The two remaining groups of white voters are split pretty evenly between Reps and Dems, while, as is well known, non-white voters strongly favor the Dems.

The Republican voting base
(percentages after each group give proportion of that group voting R).

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That’s the title of a piece that I wrote for the National Interest, responding to the ECB decision to undertake unlimited bond purchases. There’s been lots of news since then (on which I’ll write if I get time), but it only confirms the key point – Romney’s dwindling chances relied heavily on a European economic crisis happening before November, and that is now highly unlikely. The key paras

When Barack Obama celebrates his second inauguration next January, the man who did most to ensure his election victory is not likely to be there. But perhaps the president should make a note to reserve a seat for the head of the European Central Bank.

With no convention bounce and little prospect of a convincing win in presidential debates, challenger Mitt Romney’s hopes have been centered on an October surprise. Under the current circumstances, that means an economic shock sufficient to discredit Obama’s promise of a slow but steady recovery from the economic crisis. Until last week, that shock seemed likely to come from Europe. The possibility of a Greek exit from the euro, seemingly off the agenda a few months ago, had reemerged as a major factor in the investment plans of U.S. companies.
…
Last week, however, new ECB president Mario Draghi finally bit the bullet. Announcing that “the euro is irreversible,” Draghi committed the ECB to unlimited purchases of government bonds. Weidmann, the sole dissenter on the ECB board, has so far not carried out his threat to resign.

The ECB decision marks an effective end to the euro-zone sovereign-debt crisis, though not to the European depression or to the failed policies of austerity. At best, the euro zone is now in the same position as the United States and Britain: there is the prospect of a sluggish recovery but no immediate danger of collapse. A true recovery will require both a shift in central banking policy from targeting inflation to targeting nominal GDP, which looks a bit likelier now, and a shift from austerity to fiscal stimulus, which does not.