Will the Democrats’ covid-19 bill help them win over lower-income whites?

They have traditionally ignored the benefits of lefty economic policy in favor of other issues. That could be changing.

For as long as I’ve been writing about and studying public opinion (granted, four years is not that long), lower-income white votes have engaged in seemingly-paradoxical behavior: voting for Republicans. Past research suggests that this pattern has been going on much longer — like, since I’ve been alive (again, for some of you, that might not be very long!). In 2005, the political scientist Larry Bartels wrote (somewhat condescendingly) about lower-income white Republicans supporting the Bush tax cuts, despite the fact that the policy increased wealth inequality and would place larger burdens for social spending on the lower class. He titled his paper “Homer Gets a Tax Cut.”

Nearly two decades later, we have quite a bit of data to untangle this puzzle. The answer, in the simplest terms, is that white voters are motivated by things other than policies that would benefit them economically. Some research suggests that they oppose social spending because of racial conservatism — they like …