Tax the Rich

Something is shifting in the electorate. Can you feel it? It's the idea that the super-rich need to be brought to heel. According to an online survey commissioned by The New York Times and conducted by SurveyMonkey (see "Warren Wealth Tax Has Wide Support, Except Among One Group" by Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley):

The wealth tax has lost a few points of support since the last time The Times asked about the issue, in July. But it remains broadly popular, even more so than it was in February. Three-quarters of Democrats and more than half of Republicans say they approve of the idea of a 2 percent tax on wealth above $50 million.

Support for a wealth tax cuts across many of the demographic dividing lines in American politics. Men and women like it. So do the young and the old. The proposal receives majority support among every major racial, educational and income group.

College-educated Republican men, though, disapprove of it by a 15-point margin — though a vast majority of Republican men with college degrees would have a net worth below the tax threshold. (College-educated Republican women approve of the policy by an even wider margin than their male counterparts oppose it.)

This is a tsunami-size problem for the GOP as well as the plutocrats who control the Democratic National Committee. If Republican women are joining the sans-culottes, then business as usual is about to end. Even the main Mike Bloomberg ad saturating the television airwaves promises that "the wealthy will pay their fair share."

As Lambert Strether noted in yesterday's Water Cooler:

“Trump has turned the suburbs into a GOP disaster zone. Does that doom his reelection?” [Los Angeles Times]. “The orderly subdivisions and kid-friendly communities that ring the nation’s cities have become a deathtrap for Republicans, as college-educated and upper-income women flee the party in droves, costing the GOP its House majority and sapping the party’s strength in state capitals and local governments nationwide. The dramatic shift is also reshaping the 2020 presidential race, elevating Democratic hopes in traditional GOP strongholds like Arizona and Georgia, and forcing Trump to redouble efforts to boost rural turnout to offset defectors who, some fear, may never vote Republican so long as the president is on the ballot.”

Given the enormous difficulties facing the Republican Party and its MAGA standard-bearer, the action over the next six-to-eight months is going to be in the Democratic Party and whether the plutocrats can block the Warren-Sanders combination.

Can Mike Bloomberg's strategy of ditching Iowa-New Hampshire-Nevada-South Carolina and going all in on Super Tuesday pay off?

There's slim hope offered by The Times SurveyMonkey poll. High-school-educated economy-prioritizing voters are somewhat scared by taxing the "job creator" class:

The survey suggests that the newest member of the Democratic field, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, may have at least a narrow opening with voters on economic issues. About 6 percent of Democrats said they trusted Mr. Bloomberg most on the economy, putting him outside the four-person top tier (Mr. Biden, Ms. Warren, Mr. Sanders and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.) but ahead of the rest of the field.

Six percent doesn't seem like much to go on. These are voters mesmerized by the magic of money and cowed by ignorance. Bloomberg's campaign is obviously built around the assumption that Biden's voters can be swallowed along with Buttigieg's. But in order to do that Bloomberg is going to have to go darkly, satanically negative. And if he runs a pure fear campaign, he'll just drive more voters to Warren-Sanders.

With Buttigieg failing to register with voters of color, there's no place for plutocrats to go.

So it's going to have to be a Bloomberg kamikaze attack, and it's going to have to be hostile, fear-mongering, negative.