Which Party Gets More Dollars From Their Contributors?

Redacted from an article by Michael Barone

Capital Research Center Monthly
February 2017 Issue
Washington, DC

Which of America’s two political parties is the party of the rich? Many people would say it’s the Republicans. The caricature, common in the 1930s, is that the GOP is the party of the plutocrat in the Monopoly game, complete with top hat and tails. A Pew Research poll found 62 percent of Americans believe the Republicans favor the rich. But the data tell a different story.

First, the story is mixed where votes are concerned. Exit polls in recent presidential and congressional elections have shown that both parties receive substantial support from voters who make over $100,000 annually. And the stereotype falls apart when political contributions are examined: Democrats, in fact, seem to come out ahead of Republicans in raising money from the richest precincts of the nation.

To shed more light on this question, the Capital Research Center (CRC) has conducted a new analysis of political contributions from the most affluent parts of the country during the 2013–14 campaign cycle (the most recent cycle with complete data).

What This Study Measures

The data on political giving are so vast and can be dissected in so many ways that no one study can ever be exhaustive. This particular study emphasizes, not who or what are the most powerful political donors in our system (think of the eternal arguments about the relative powers and influence of unions, corporations, and PACs) but rather, which party’s candidates receive the most contributions from America’s wealthy elites who live in the poshest locales.

In this study of rich donors, CRC has focused on donations by individuals (not by groups) that are given to individual candidates of the two major political parties, not to party committees or to other political actors like super PACs or unions.

It’s reasonable to focus on the individuals who donate and receive these funds, given how many politicians and pundits imply that wealthy Americans regularly “buy” elections for the political party that’s supposedly biased toward the rich.

But even if the parameters of this study were far broader, there’s little reason to believe the outcomes would significantly change. For example, federal spending by Super PACs in this same cycle skewed $196.8 million “for Democrats/against Republicans,” versus $139.9 million “for Republicans/against Democrats,” according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Political Giving by “the 1 Percent”

As journalists and scholars have shown in recent years, affluent Americans are concentrated in certain neighborhoods to a considerable extent—indeed, to a greater extent than in the past.

Bill Bishop in his 2008 book The Big Sort illustrated how people with similar levels of education, income and wealth, and cultural attitudes have increasingly clustered in places filled with others of similar characteristics. The social scientist Charles Murray in his 2012 book Coming Apart showed how those at the very top of these scales are clustered in zip codes that he christened, “SuperZips.”

CRC’s study asks to which party do such people—who are much more likely than the ordinary voter to be able to afford sizable discretionary spending—contribute their money?

The overall answer is that more money from the top 300 SuperZips in 2013–14 went to Democrats than Republicans, by a significant but not overwhelming margin, if you set aside those contributions over $1 million made by wealthy individuals to their own campaigns. (Which were usually lost, by the way)

Out-of-State Giving

Some observers may argue that partisan contributions are not a fair measure of the party preferences of persons living in elite neighborhoods, because many affluent contributors may simply be donating for pragmatic reasons to state and local officials of the dominant party, which in many metro areas, and the Big Four in particular, is overwhelmingly likely to be Democratic. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, for example, has said he made many of his local donations just to help his business, not because he agreed with the pols who received the money.

This conclusion also proved false. These numbers reinforce the fact that America’s elite across the nation have powerful sympathies toward the Democratic Party. And the more elite their neighborhood is in America’s most powerful cities, the more strongly they lean Democrat.

Top 300 zip codes nationwide (representing the top 1.4 percent of socio-economic status):
Democrats $71 million
Republicans $47 million

Conclusion

These data are powerful evidence that affluent Americans in the most elite locales contribute significantly more money to Democrats than Republicans.

The data also show that Democrats raise a notable chunk of their campaign money in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC Democratic candidates and party officials attending affluent contributors’ fundraisers evidently have to spend a lot of time in airliners or private jets flying coast to coast across the country, while Republican candidates and party officials have to make significantly more fundraising stops, staggered across the giant landmass of America between the two coasts.

Half a century ago, many liberal commentators argued that Democrats, as the party whose policies allegedly represented the interests of lower-income Americans, had an unfair disadvantage in raising money for campaigns, because they couldn’t compete with Republicans for access to the checkbooks of the wealthy. The data presented here make clear that that argument, regardless of whether it was valid then, has no validity today.

A change in rhetoric is therefore indicate  i.e. the retirement of the nationwide claim that” the Republicans are the party of the rich.”  Not so. If either party is the party of the rich, it is the Democrats.

About the author:

Michael Barone is Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. Some of Michael Barone’s frequent topics: Politics | White House | Campaigns | Obamacare | Demographics | Entitlements | Big Government | Polls | 2014 Elections

Are The Republicans Going To Blow This Great Opportunity?

DEMOCRATS IN DECLINE

BY JOHN HINDERAKER 

The great under-reported story of this year’s election cycle is the ongoing decline of the Democratic Party. We have written many times about the fact that at the state and local levels, the Republicans have become dominant. The GOP controls two-thirds of state legislative bodies and 60% of the nation’s governorships, not to mention both houses of Congress. To some extent, Republican ascendancy has been obscured by the fact that the Democrats control the presidency. But their hold on that office is weakening rapidly.

This is reflected in the enthusiasm gap. Republicans are fired up and anxious to retake the White House. Democrats, battered and depressed after seven years of a failed Obama administration, are inclined to stay home. The numbers are unequivocal, as Michael Baronepoints out:

I’m not the only one who has noticed that Democratic caucus and primary turnout so far has been down as compared to 2008 and that Republican caucus and primary turnout has been up as compared to either 2012 or 2008. …

The results of the South Carolina Democratic primary Saturday confirm the trend. Total turnout was 370,000, down 30 percent from 2008’s 532,000 ….

Many commentators have noticed that blacks constituted a higher percentage of South Carolina Democratic voters this year, 65 percent according to the exit poll, than they did in 2008, 55 percent. But this represents not a surge of blacks into the electorate, but rather the fact that black turnout declined by only 18 percent, whereas white turnout fell nearly in half, by 44 percent.

That is a stunning number. The white Democrat is an endangered species, unless he is a hedge fund manager, Silicon Valley magnate or public sector union member. It is bizarre for a major political party in a two-party system, as opposed to a fragmented parliamentary arrangement, to scorn the votes of a majority of the population. I doubt whether it has ever happened before. But the Democrats have made it clear that non-rich, non-public sector whites are unwelcome in their party. Formerly Democratic white voters have gotten the hint.

Clinton and Sanders both got significantly fewer white votes than Clinton or Edwards got in 2008. It is as if many South Carolina whites, with an ancestral attachment to the Democratic party, have decided to secede from it. White turnout in South Carolina’s Republican primary was 707,000, compared to 129,000 in the Democratic primary.

As Barone properly notes, those turnout figures relate in part to the fact that there was a competitive race on the Republican side, but not the Democratic. But the result is the same in state after state: historic turnouts in the Republican primary, declining numbers of voters showing up on the Democratic side.

This isn’t surprising: how much enthusiasm can a party engender, when it can’t come up with a single plausible candidate less than 68 years old? But the rot, I think, goes deeper than that. The Democrats aren’t just out of candidates, they are out of ideas. Republicans are on the brink of a golden opportunity, if they don’t do something supremely stupid.

Unintended Consequences and ObamaCrapCare

ObamaCrapCare has so many unintended consequences that an entire blog could be used for a year to lay out its deficits.  In the following posting by Michael Barone, he discusses an issue that most people who are not involved with employers, HR departments and the like would ever have thought about, including the "architects" of ObamaCrapCare.

Employer's second largest cost, more than raw materials and plant and equipment, is health insurance. To be able to cut this expense drops significant dollars directly to the bottom line. If this can be done with out impacting retention, it is a major plus.

There are a number of industries where turnover is high and training minimal that can afford to provide bare bones plans, as allowed by ObamaCrapCare, those companies will be able to increase their profits and still comply with the law.  The problem is that these plans, as designed by the Washington brain trust, are not what you would buy if you had the choice.

As with most things in life, health care cost and benefits usually have a high degree of correlation.  If you want a program that is top of the line with few deductibles and low co-pays  it will be expensive.  On the other hand if you want a plan with a very high deductible (such as  $10,000 or $20,000) and co-pays (as low as 50% for another $10,000), those plans are currently available and the cost is low.  However, after January first that whole landscape changes.

On the first of the year, the highest deductible available will be $2500. The benefits for that plan vary, however, most will have limited visits to the doctor (2-6 per year per person), generic drugs only, and additional co-pays for hospital stays and outpatient care. It will be a very poor plan.  It will cover the "essential" benefits but not much else.

As an example, over the past six weeks, yours truly has been fighting kidney stones. It is not a life or death issue, however, we have had three visits to the ER for pain, one lithotrypsy procedure (outpatient) and a stent removal (also out patient.)  We have been to see doctors four times. We have not received the bills yet, however, it would not surprise us to see charges in excess of $10,000. If we had had one of the skimpy plans to which Barone writes, the we would be saddled with most of that cost.

Most people who are now praising ObamaCrapCare have not looked at the unintended outcomes. Employers will do what they can to lower costs, meaning less in benefits. Those who can will end their reliance on private insurance and will tell their people to go to the exchanges and gladly pay the lesser fine for not providing the insurance. 

After a couple years of trying to keep private insurance, employers who want to take care of their employees will be forced for economic and survival reasons to send their employees to the exchanges. They won't like to do it, but will forced to do so by their competition.

Within 6 years, we suspect by 2020,  most private insurance will be gone. Insurance companies will find that they cannot profitably produce and manage the product and they will get out of the market. The only remaining segments that will exist will be government and union plans (we wonder how they got so lucky??) as well as those "cadillac" plans that will still be available for the wealthy.  The rest of us will have ObamaCrapCare.

Initially it will be low skilled workers who get shafted but it will not be long before the rest of us get to see how bad health care can really become under Obama's nightmare.

Conservative Tom

ObamaCrapCare--Another Central Planning Failure

ObamaCrapCare has so many unintended consequences that an entire blog could be used for a year to lay out its deficits.  In the following posting by Michael Barone, he discusses an issue that most people who are not involved with employers, HR departments and the like would ever have thought about, including the "architects" of ObamaCrapCare.

Employer's second largest cost, more than raw materials and plant and equipment, is health insurance. To be able to cut this expense drops significant dollars directly to the bottom line. If this can be done with out impacting retention, it is a major plus.

There are a number of industries where turnover is high and training minimal that can afford to provide bare bones plans, as allowed by ObamaCrapCare, those companies will be able to increase their profits and still comply with the law.  The problem is that these plans, as designed by the Washington brain trust, are not what you would buy if you had the choice.

As with most things in life, health care cost and benefits usually have a high degree of correlation.  If you want a program that is top of the line with few deductibles and low co-pays  it will be expensive.  On the other hand if you want a plan with a very high deductible (such as  $10,000 or $20,000) and co-pays (as low as 50% for another $10,000), those plans are currently available and the cost is low.  However, after January first that whole landscape changes.

On the first of the year, the highest deductible available will be $2500. The benefits for that plan vary, however, most will have limited visits to the doctor (2-6 per year per person), generic drugs only, and additional co-pays for hospital stays and outpatient care. It will be a very poor plan.  It will cover the "essential" benefits but not much else.

As an example, over the past six weeks, yours truly has been fighting kidney stones. It is not a life or death issue, however, we have had three visits to the ER for pain, one lithotrypsy procedure (outpatient) and a stent removal (also out patient.)  We have been to see doctors four times. We have not received the bills yet, however, it would not surprise us to see charges in excess of $10,000. If we had had one of the skimpy plans to which Barone writes, the we would be saddled with most of that cost.

Most people who are now praising ObamaCrapCare have not looked at the unintended outcomes. Employers will do what they can to lower costs, meaning less in benefits. Those who can will end their reliance on private insurance and will tell their people to go to the exchanges and gladly pay the lesser fine for not providing the insurance. 

After a couple years of trying to keep private insurance, employers who want to take care of their employees will be forced for economic and survival reasons to send their employees to the exchanges. They won't like to do it, but will forced to do so by their competition.

Within 6 years, we suspect by 2020,  most private insurance will be gone. Insurance companies will find that they cannot profitably produce and manage the product and they will get out of the market. The only remaining segments that will exist will be government and union plans (we wonder how they got so lucky??) as well as those "cadillac" plans that will still be available for the wealthy.  The rest of us will have ObamaCrapCare.

Initially it will be low skilled workers who get shafted but it will not be long before the rest of us get to see how bad health care can really become under Obama's nightmare.

Conservative Tom

Low-skilled Worked Get Raw Deal Under Obamacare

Michael Barone | May 23, 2013

Recommend this article 

• Comments9

Would you like to have a "skinny" health insurance policy? Probably not. But if you're employed by a large company, you may get one, thanks to Obamacare.

That's the conclusion of Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews. They report that insurance brokers are pitching and selling "low-benefit" policies across the country.

You might be wondering what a "skinny" or "low-benefit" insurance plan is. The terms may vary, but the basic idea is that policies would cover preventive care, a limited number of doctor visits and perhaps generic drugs.

They wouldn't cover things such as surgery, hospital stays or prenatal care. That sounds similar to an auto insurance policy that reimburses you when you change the oil but not when your car gets totaled.

You might ask how Obamacare could encourage the proliferation of such policies. It was sold as a way to provide more coverage for more people, after all.

And people were told they could keep the health insurance they had.

As Weaver and Mathews explain, Obamacare's requirement that insurance policies include "essential" benefits such as mental health services apply only to small businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

But larger employers, they write, "need only cover preventive service, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty." Low-benefit plans may cost an employer only $40 to $100 a month per employee. That's less than the $2,000-per-employee penalty for providing no insurance.

"We wouldn't have anticipated that there'd be demand for these type of Band-Aid plans in 2014," the Journal quotes former White House health adviser Robert Kocher. "Our expectation was that employers would offer high-quality insurance."

Oops. It turns out that Friedrich Hayek may have been right when he wrote that central planners would never have enough information to micromanage the economy.

It's probably true that businesses trying to attract and retain high-skill employees for long-term positions have an economic incentive to offer generous and attractive health insurance. Otherwise they'd lose good people to competitors.

But the kind of businesses mentioned in the Journal story -- restaurants, retailers, assisted-living chains -- tend to employ lower-skill workers who typically work there only temporarily.

In a high-unemployment economy they may not need to offer gold-plated health insurance to get the workforce they need.

Such employers would have to pay a $3,000 penalty for each employee who buys insurance on Obamacare's health insurance exchanges. But it seems likely that many workers, especially young ones, would opt not to pay the hefty premiums for that.

The problem here is that Obamacare's architects seem to misunderstand the concept of insurance.

People buy insurance to pay for low-probability, high-cost and undesirable events. It doesn't make sense to hold onto enough cash to replace your house if it burns when you can buy an insurance policy that will cover that unlikely disaster.

But Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has a different idea of what insurance is.

In response to an American Society of Actuaries report that health insurance premiums would rise 32 percent under Obamacare, she said, "Some of these folks have very high catastrophic plans that don't pay for anything unless you get hit by a bus."

Her idea apparently is that insurance should pay for just about every health care procedure.

In her defense, the World War II decision to make the cost of health insurance deductible for employers and nontaxable for employees has moved things in that direction. Many people have come to expect that.

But as the Daily Beast's Megan McArdle commented, "Coverage of routine, predictable services is not insurance at all; it's a spectacularly inefficient prepayment plan."

Some Obamacare architects, including its namesake, want to move toward a single-payer system in which government would pay all health care costs.

Many Obamacare opponents want a bigger role for markets, allowing consumers to choose insurance that covers catastrophes and paying for routine costs with tax-free (and in some cases subsidized) dollars.

But if large numbers of employees are enrolled in "skinny" health insurance plans, as the Wall Street Journal article suggests, Obamacare will have produced an unanticipated outcome no one wants.

People stuck with these policies will have insurance that pays for the equivalent of oil changes (up to six a year!) but not for the equivalent of wrecked car. Just the opposite of real insurance.

Results: 315 For Romney-Could We Be So Lucky?

Michael Barone predict a major  blowout! Could we be so lucky? If you listened to the "experts" this morning on the Sunday talk shows, you would think that Barone was smoking some funny cigarettes.

We think it will be closer than 315 for Romney which will result in hundreds if not thousands of lawsuits against precincts, cities and states. It could push off the results for weeks or even months. Could we see the inauguration put off until after litigation efforts end?

Conservative Tom

Barone Predicts Blowout… 315 Electoral Votes For Mitt Romney

On November 4, 2012, in 2012 Roadmap, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, by Eric Odom

In case you missed it… Michael Barone is predicting a massive landslide victory for Romney. Normally I wouldn’t post a prediction such as this, but Barone is no dummy. He’s got a great grasp on the data and his view on this race a few days out is stunning.
His reasoning on the matter is quite sound.

Also, both national and target state polls show that independents, voters who don’t identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, break for Romney.
That might not matter if Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 39 to 32 percent, as they did in the 2008 exit poll. But just about every indicator suggests that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting — and about their candidate — than they were in 2008, and Democrats are less so.
That’s been apparent in early or absentee voting, in which Democrats trail their 2008 numbers in target states Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada.

I can see PA ending with a big surprise Romney win. I would say Obama has a better shot there, but anything is possible. The big surprise for me is Barone’s take that Nevada would go Obama… even in this environment.

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Nevada (6). Democratic early-voting turnout is down from 2008 in Las Vegas’ Clark County, 70 percent of the state. But the casino unions’ turnout machine on Election Day re-elected an unpopular Harry Reid in 2010, and I think they’ll get enough Latinos and Filipinos out this time. Obama.

Here’s the thing. Las Vegas outright rejected Sharon Angle in 2010. In fact, Angle couldn’t even win her own home county of Washoe, which is traditionally a very conservative/Republican county. The 2010 race in Nevada was less an acceptance of Harry Reid as it was a rejection of Angle. Additionally, Dean Heller is set to win a big Senate battle and Angle didn’t have another epic race on the ticket alongside to help.
I think if Barone’s prediction of 315 electoral votes for Romney comes true, it will likely be 321 with Nevada’s 6.