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What I'm doing right now with my colleagues Jie Chen and Paul Jorgensen is we're looking at the county election data. That's beset by problems, too, including the fact that it isn't all in. People keep coming in with more votes not in the fraud sense; it just takes them a long time to count. I mean, anybody who deals with election data seriously knows that many states don't report their vote totals, at least in the old days, through up to January, actually, when they have to be certified.
Anyway, there's enough data in there. I think you can see that it's pretty obvious that what The Washington Post and others are telling you is just close enough to the truth to be seriously misleading. That is to say, they are saying, well, you know, the really well-off areas voted for Biden and the slower-growing ones mostly went for Trump. What we're finding basically is this: in the counties that grew very slowly or not at all and I'm using here population growth as an index for that in other words, if you were having a lot of people because you're growing, you were very likely to have a heavier anti-Trump vote. But the Trump vote is strongly boosted in counties where they're not growing much or hardly at all. In other words, they've been losing. They've been in decline for a long time, is my simple take on that.
The other thing you notice and here, you got all kinds of people missing the point if you take a look at what Trump's economic policies did just in terms of actual income coming to people between basically 2017 and 2019, what you find is that in those areas where unemployment rates went way down, they were much more likely to vote for Trump. Now, this point bears expansion. You can see that it will be affecting sort what the incoming Democrats will do. It's not a secret that Trump kept pressuring the Federal Reserve to keep rates down. Now, people tend to forget that right after the last presidential election in 2016, lots of Democratic economists not everybody, but a lot of them and of course a very large number of Republican economists were demanding that the Fed hike rates. They said we were at full employment. I think I did an interview with you where I just dismissed that as nonsense. Certainly, a lot of other people did, too. And it's not like Trump was sitting there trying to figure out the Phillips Curve. He just beat them [The Fed] up and just held them [interest rates] down. Now, they did raise rates sometimes, but, for sure, they didn't raise them as fast as some wanted. The result was those unemployment rates went down, down, down.
Soon we were listening to complaints from even some Republicans and a lot of businessmen: "Wages are rising. We can't find workers." To which the short answer is, well, you know, you could raise your wages a little bit. And it just kept coming. We never exhausted that pool of, if you like, reserve labor. Covid finished that off. I mean, and that's why looking at the time periods when you measure really matters. I mean, then it threw the whole United States into recession.
But it's obvious that people got the point that they were, in effect, finding jobs and their wages were rising for the first time and substantially in a long time and in a lot of places. And it was also true what Trump said, which was that blacks, Hispanics, all kinds of groups out of labor markets they were all out there finding jobs. There were even theories that went to sociology, which I never advise or almost never, you got theories about why these people culturally didn't want to work or something like that? They were all out there finding jobs. I'm not telling you they were great jobs. They were not. But you could get working hours for the first time in a long time. You could make some money and people did.
Now, what we're finding in our studies is that the combination of coming from a slow-growth area in the form of depopulation and really showing a big drop in the unemployment rate up to the moment when the economy collapsed or, really, 2019 is really powerful. And I would just broaden this: at the bottom of a huge amount of the gap in perceptions in this country right now is the calculation by lots of folks that the people running the Democratic Party just didn't care very much about them. Now, my colleagues and I in our 2016 paper on voting actually went in and looked at the evidence on people who had dropped out of the electorate between 2012 and 2016. (In other words let's be precise they voted for Obama and then didn't vote or they voted for Trump.) Those people were saying, you know, we can't see any difference between the major parties there.
I mean, a lot of people were turned off. I would add, too, that there's a hinterland aspect to this that's important. Mainstream Democratic Party thinking is heavily affected by climate change. Now, I'm not trying to tell you the climate isn't getting worse. It's gotten a lot worse. And we've got a serious problem. I'd just tell people, stick your head out the window and inhale during the wildfires. Wherever you were, even in Europe, you were probably inhaling some of it. But for twenty years or so, lots of environmental regulations had the net effect of pulling land out West out of use. Mostly; it didn't pull much land out in the East, though occasionally it does. Particularly in timber areas and really far-out peripheries, it's circumscribed people's allowable economic activity. And those folks resented it and you could see the differences over time as nothing was put in its place, as nobody made an effort to sort of like even get the Internet out there in a large way. I mean, the Democratic Party had almost nothing to say to those folks except I guess, move to the cities or something like that. I mean, there was this long controversy when Howard Dean was trying to get the party to reach out in every state. That was famously ended.
And so bluntly, a large chunk of the population gets the idea that Democratic elites don't like them very much and that their policies don't do much for them. Under Trump, that did change. In general, the Trump economic policies were terrible for the income distribution and they were terrible for growth in the economy, if you like, in the aggregate. But they did have this sort of short-run cyclical component that did push up wages. And that's really powerful. That's kind of like an "Alpenglow," I suspect, after the sun goes down, that's going to resound out there in the hinterlands unless Biden does something quickly to convince people that he gets it. That is going to be hard given that he's got a divided Congress and he's likely to take office, not like Franklin D. Roosevelt did with all the banks closed, but with enormous numbers of people either directly sick from coronavirus or recovering, including some of them with the so-called long version.
Paul JayA lot of people say, including people on the left, that the Republican Party is becoming more the party of the working class. Trump tries to say this, too. But the thing is that the big cities didn't vote for Trump and the big cities are majority working-class.
Tom FergusonThat's right. More broadly, when you look at the polls Now, one problem is that it's tough to look at the polls. I mean, I have big problems with the way these polls are presented. They do it in pieces. You can rarely see the whole poll. And a lot of reports are collapsing the income categories so that you can learn almost nothing. If you look all over the place, you can sometimes come up with better data; people will do better groupings.
OK, the most illuminating one is that in the two lowest income categories I've seen, the Democrats actually were still getting the majority of the votes there, if people voted at all. As usual. This has been a pretty common thing for many years. In the grouping from $100,000 [annual income] to about $200,000 also from $50k above, too Trump support was substantially larger. Particularly between about $100,000 and my memory on this is about up to $200,000, it was quite heavy. Now, these are not working-class voters in general, I think. But they are not the one percent either. A lot of them for sure are running their own businesses or they are in very small enterprises a trucking firm or something -at the executive level, not at the driving level where they're likely to belong to the Teamsters, and, I guess, are more likely to actually have voted for Biden.
Biden took most union votes on average, although I have seen numbers raising some severe questions about particular states, notably in Pennsylvania. I would like to see a better and fuller presentation on that question. It's pretty obvious that a substantial number of unions in, say, coal and oil were not keen on the Green New Deal, were not keen on Biden, and at least some of their members may actually have pretty heavily supported some of the Republicans. This business needs some clarification.
Paul JayAm I correct in my understanding that the Republicans did not won the majority of the working class? That it's just that Trump was able to win a little more of the working class than traditional Republicans do, which in 2016 was decisive, but then it seems like he lost at least some of that in this current election.
Tom FergusonActually, my memory on this is he actually did a little better among people making $200,000-plus. Not hugely. I mean, in general, the big point about these election returns is they don't vary all that much. They vary just a bit, but not a lot, from 2016. But as best as I can tell about what's going on with Trump support in middle income levels there is that it's really a sort of regional or rural section. It's not entirely clear to me who's doing what in there.
But the notion that they're working-class? No. And there was this Hispanic swing against the Democrats. The percentage of Hispanic voters that went for Trump was substantially larger than people had expected. That wasn't universal. In particular, when you start looking at this, everybody mentions Florida and Texas. Now, that's pretty interesting because I'm being told by people down in Miami that the Democrats down there did not mention minimum wages hardly at all in their campaign. I have not seen that discussed in any press report. Instead, we hear stories about, "Well, we all thought that Hispanics were going to vote for Biden and they didn't." Well, what exactly was said down there? I think that bears some analysis. If my friend's claims are true, and they live down there or watch on TV, that's really interesting.
In Texas. I'm looking at that myself with my colleagues. And there what I'm finding is a pretty straightforward interaction between oil and Hispanic percentages of the population. That's clear. On the other hand, the swing in Texas and parts of other states, are bigger than that. Now, what I actually think probably happened there is that along the border where construction for the wall was a big deal, a lot of contractors basically did what they would do. As a matter of fact, if anyone was on the other side of that wall debate in the south, they simply told their workforce that there isn't going to be any more contracting jobs if they stop building the wall. And I can't find anybody discussing this. It is testable. My colleagues and I are trying to test it.
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