What kind of voters do Democrats need more of?

David Leonhardt had the answer in a recent column. He calls them “Scaffles”—socially conservative and fiscally liberal voters. These are cross-pressured swing voters—and there are a lot of them. Socially liberal, fiscally liberal voters vote Democratic. Socially and fiscally conservative voters vote Republican. And there just aren’t very many socially liberal, fiscally conservative voters. So the Scaffles are where the action is. If the Democrats hope to vanquish the Republicans decisively, this is where the Democrats should be concentrating. As they say down South, you gotta go hunting where the ducks are. …

These and other findings fairly scream out for compromise on the part of Democrats to meet the Scaffles closer to where they live in cultural and value terms. So why aren’t they doing so?

To put it in the simplest possible terms: follow the money. The Democrats are a far different party than they were back in their heyday as the party of America’s working class. They are far more dependent in every way on more affluent and educated voters. Today Democrats control around two-thirds of the Congressional districts where median income exceeds the national average, while Republicans control around two-thirds of the districts where the median income is below the national average. That’s quite a change.

[I’d dispute Teixeira’s assumption that there aren’t many socially liberal-fiscally conservative voters. In fact, I’d guess that there are more of those than the “Scaffles,” and also that they would be much easier to reach for Dems as well. In my experience, there are a lot of live-and-let-live conservatives who are much more engaged on fiscal and liberty issues than Teixeira assumes. Still, Dems aren’t reaching them either, and for the same reason he posits here — the money on the Left is now mostly controlled by hard-Left progressives and cultural Marxists. — Ed]