A new study presents evidence that cable news causes voters — and thus, politicians — to put a greater premium on social issues. | William West/AFP via Getty Images

In today’s America, the less money a white voter has, the more likely they are to support Donald Trump.

Whites in the bottom 10 percent of America’s income distribution broke for the GOP nominee in 2024 by landslide margins. Those in the top 5 percent largely backed Democrat Kamala Harris, according to American National Election Studies data.

For most of the past century, the opposite pattern prevailed: In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, poor whites voted to the left of rich ones.

But that changed in 2016. Eight years later, the new, negative correlation between income and Republicanism among whites became unprecedentedly strong, as Ohio State University political scientist Tom Wood has shown:

This development surely reflects Trump’s personal imprint on American life. Yet it was also made possible by long-term, structural shifts in our politics.

In the mid-20th century, Americans without college degrees voted sharply to the left of university graduates. But beginning in the late 1960s, this gap started to narrow before finally flipping in 2004. The relationship between socioeconomic status and partisanship in the United States therefore changed gradually — and then, with Trump’s populist rebrand of the GOP, all at once.

This realignment had many causes. An indispensable factor, however, was the rising salience of “culture war” issues.

Over the past 50 years, debates over immigration, crime, abortion, religion, race, and gender became increasingly prominent in American politics. As this happened, voters began sorting themselves less on the basis of their economic attitudes and more on that of their cultural ones. And since college-educated voters lean left on most social issues — while less educated voters lean right — this eroded the lower classes’ traditional attachment to the Democratic Party (and the upper classes’ historic ties to the GOP).

Liberals often lament these developments — and not without reason. Some consequences of cultural polarization seem perverse. Many poor Americans today 1) express progressive views on health care and social welfare, 2) say that economic issues are their top concern, and 3) nonetheless vote for the party hellbent on cutting their Medicaid and food stamp benefits.

And of course, Democrats’ flagging support with working-class voters has enabled Trump’s electoral success — thereby imperiling American democracy.

For these reasons, the question of why the culture war gained such political prominence has long preoccupied Democrats. Some progressives blame their........

© Vox