Rose's conclusion is not that Democrats should abandon the interests of the poor or working families who are struggling to get by in today's tumultuous economy. Instead, he argues that the party needs to modernize its economic and social programs so that it speaks to the aspirations of a larger constituency -- the working poor, America's broad middle-class, and people in long-term economic distress.

Introduction

It is an article of faith among many liberal Democratic partisans that a significant percentage of people who vote for Republicans are willfully voting against their own class interests. They are being suckered, the argument goes, by the Republicans' disingenuous appeals on issues of cultural morality and by simplistic calls for a less meddlesome government.

How else are we to explain the "Reagan Democrat" phenomenon that has flummoxed the Democratic Party for two and a half decades now? Author Thomas Frank popularized this argument in his bestselling 2004 book, What's the Matter With Kansas? He starkly portrayed much of the country as being in the grip of "madness and delusion," sketching a twisted political landscape:

"...of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys in Midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life."

At first, the syllogism at the heart of this argument seems to make a certain amount of sense: The Republican Party has traditionally been the party of capital and the Democratic Party has traditionally been the party of workers. Most people are workers. Therefore, the majority of voters should be Democrats.

Indeed, proponents of class-interest populism argue this amounts to a potentially decisive political advantage that Democrats are blithely ignoring on the misinformed advice of out-of-touch, inside-the-Beltway political consultants who encourage candidates to grovel cravenly for campaign cash from moneyed special interests. Moreover, say the populists, in the absence of a compelling economic message from Democrats, a biased news media is failing to report the true, nefarious impact of Republican policies.

The core argument in the liberal case for class-interest populism is deeply flawed in at least two important respects. First, it has been well established in studies of voting behavior that people no longer choose candidates primarily on the basis of "pocketbook" issues, as they did when the New Deal coalition dominated national politics. Instead, now that the old working class has been subsumed into a broader middle class, voters tend to balance personal experience (such as the party identification of family and friends), a sense of self-interest (however defined), and a concern for society as a whole. Second, even if people did vote primarily on pocket-book issues, the group that could reasonably be categorized as having a clear, class-based interest in voting for Democratic policies would comprise less than one-quarter of the population. Authors like Thomas Frank have not noticed this because they tend to rely on isolated examples of workers' economic misfortunes -- anecdotes -- rather than a serious analysis of actual economic and demographic data.

To be sure, middle-income voters have a legitimate beef with Republican economic policies. The Bush tax cuts have been loaded in favor of the wealthy, shifting the relative tax burden to the broad, working middle class. Over the last six years, wealthy Americans also have reaped a disproportionate share of the economy's growth, while earnings for individuals in the middle have stagnated. Inflation is under control, but soaring health care premiums, out-of-pocket health costs, and rising college tuitions are eating up an increasing share of consumers' disposable income. As companies react to fierce global competition by shedding health and pension costs, there has been a very real shift of economic risk to working Americans.

Democrats, of course, must speak to these worries. But they must recognize that today's working Americans have a very different economic outlook than the blue-collar workers of yesteryear. Their outlook is more aspirational and less infused with class grievance or resentment. In the post-industrial economy, the great question is how government can equip workers with new tools for economic success, not how government can insulate them from the rigors of competition or restrain business power.

Yet, class-interest populists cling to an outdated concept of workers' interests -- a holdover from the New Deal-to-Great Society era, when a large blue-collar class was fight-ing for a fair share of the industrial economy's rewards. Today, most people work in offices or high-end service jobs and they believe their economic interests are more closely aligned with the companies they work for.

Moreover, it is an occupational hazard of those with big hearts to overestimate the share of the population living in economic distress. That is easy to do with yearly income data because annual figures can be deceptive. Graduate students are likely to report very low incomes for a few years while they are in school, for example. But they should not be categorized with those in true economic distress, because their condition is only temporary. Workers who are not in school have fluctuating incomes, as well. It makes much more sense, therefore, to look at people's average earnings over a longer period, like 15 years. Analyzed that way, the data show that about 23 percent of the population can be categorized as having a direct personal interest in supporting the social safety net programs that most of the public strongly associates with the Democratic Party -- programs that help people living in poverty or just a few rungs above it.

Democrats may protest the suggestion that they only stand for social safety net pro-grams for the poor; they may rightly argue that their whole social and economic platform is to the benefit of most Americans. But the hard truth is that most Americans simply don't perceive themselves to have class interests that strongly align them with one party or the other. That is, they don't believe that the direct, pocketbook benefits of either party's policies are so overwhelming as to outweigh all other political considerations.

On a wide range of other issues, Democratic policies have unquestionably had a direct impact on workers' lives -- the 40-hour week, overtime pay, and sick leave, to name a few -- but most of those policies have long since become widely accepted. They go largely unchallenged even in Republican ad-ministrations, so the Democratic Party reaps little benefit for having championed them in the first place, even though it is still perceived to be the party of business regulation. The same is true for America's flagship retirement security programs, Social Security and Medicare. Both were originally Democratic policies, but like workplace standards, they have become such an integral part of the American social contract that voters do not definitively credit one political party for managing them better than the other. For example, even in the spring of 2005 -- when President Bush was energetically campaigning for a Social Security reform plan that the public overwhelmingly opposed -- pollsters typically only found a 10 percent to 12 percent advantage for Democrats over Republicans on the generic question, "Who do you trust more to handle the issue of Social Security?" And that Democratic advantage never rose from a plurality to a clear majority, because a significant percentage of those polled invariably said they did not trust either party.

To prove the fallacy of arguments like Thomas Frank's definitively, however, we must first establish a valid definition of class interests, and then use that definition to calculate a realistic estimate of the number of people for whom Democratic policies provide direct, unquestionable benefits.

Stephen Rose is a labor economist specializing in issues related to job quality, stability, earnings, and inequality. He has worked for the Department of Labor, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, the National Commission for Employment Policy, the Washington State Senate, and the Educational Testing Service.