A Republican Spending Problem

Will the House be willing to cut programs that benefit the G.O.P. voters?

As congressional Republicans prepare for a budget showdown later this year with President Biden, they say they will push for deep cuts in federal spending. So far, however, they've left out some pretty important details: what those cuts might be.

Republicans have been more willing to talk about what they will not cut. Party leaders have promised not to touch health insurance and social security. Republicans generally oppose cuts to military spending and benefits for veterans. And neither side can do anything about interest payments on the debt the government has already accumulated. Together, these categories account for nearly two-thirds of federal government spending.

The largest remaining category is health spending that benefits low- and middle-income families , including Medicaid and Obamacare. Far-right Republicans, like some members of the Freedom Caucus, have signaled they will offer cuts to these programs. Party leaders, for their part, said they would consider cuts to poverty-relieving programs such as food stamps.

But cuts like these would have a big potential downside for Republicans: Partisan shifts in recent years mean that Republican voters now benefit from these redistribution programs even more than Democratic voters.

As Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic recently wrote, The cross-party showdown over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent filled districts. of older, low-income voters who rely on social programs that the G.O.P. wants to cut."

Nearly 70 percent of House Republicans represent districts where the median income is below the national median, according to researchers at the University of Southern California In contrast, about 60 percent of House Democrats represent districts wealthier than the median.

Class politics, as Brownstein puts it, has been reversed.

I've written before about the strains this reversal has created for Democrats. The party increasingly reflects the views of professionals high-income earners who tend to be more liberal on social issues than most swing voters Today's left is less religious and patriotic than the country as a whole and less concerned with crime and border security The left is more focused on the differences between Americans, especially ier on race, gender, and sexuality than on what Americans have in common.

This change has been happening for a long time, but it has accelerated in course of the last decade. “The New Left is very self-aware,” my colleague Nate Cohn wrote last week. "Obama-era liberals tended to emphasize commonalities between groups and downplay long-standing racial, religious and partisan divides." (In this article, Nate makes a thoughtful attempt to define "woke".)

These developments have created challenges for the Democratic Party. It continued to lose working-class white voters and recently lost Latino and Asian American voters. Biden and his aides spend considerable time pondering these issues, and he has tried to take a less elitist approach. Democrats don't 'pay close to...