In today\u2019s America, the less money a white voter has, the more likely they are to support Donald Trump.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2022 In recent decades, culture war issues have become increasingly salient in American politics, triggering a realignment of the major party coalitions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2022 A new study suggests that the rise of cable television fueled these trends: Facing heightened competition, news broadcasters realized that social issues were better at attracting viewers\u2019 attention than economic ones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2022 Digital media has made the attention economy even more competitive \u2014 and thus, culture war controversies even more prominent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Whites in the bottom 10 percent of America\u2019s income distribution<\/a> broke for the GOP nominee in 2024 by landslide margins. Those in the top 5 percent largely backed Democrat Kamala Harris, according to American National Election Studies data.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For most of the past century, the opposite pattern prevailed: In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, poor whites voted to the left of rich ones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But that changed in 2016. Eight years later, the new, negative <\/em>correlation between income and Republicanism among whites became unprecedentedly strong, as Ohio State University political scientist Tom Wood has shown<\/a>:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This development surely reflects Trump\u2019s personal imprint on American life. Yet it was also made possible by long-term, structural shifts in our politics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the mid-20th century, Americans without college degrees voted sharply to the left of university graduates. But beginning in the late 1960s, this gap started to narrow before finally flipping in 2004<\/a>. The relationship between socioeconomic status and partisanship in the United States therefore changed gradually \u2014 and then, with Trump\u2019s populist rebrand of the GOP, all at once.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This realignment had many causes. An indispensable factor, however, was the rising salience of \u201cculture war\u201d issues<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Over the past 50 years, debates over immigration, crime, abortion, religion, race, and gender became increasingly prominent in American politics. As this happened, voters began sorting themselves less on the basis of their economic attitudes and more on that of their cultural ones<\/a>. And since college-educated voters lean left on most social issues<\/a> \u2014 while less educated voters lean right \u2014 this eroded the lower classes\u2019 traditional attachment to the Democratic Party (and the upper classes\u2019 historic ties to the GOP).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Liberals often lament these developments \u2014 and not without reason. Some consequences of cultural polarization seem perverse. Many poor Americans today 1) express progressive views<\/a> on health care and social welfare, 2) say that economic issues are their top concern, and 3) nonetheless vote for the party hellbent on cutting their Medicaid<\/a> and food stamp benefits<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And of course, Democrats\u2019 flagging support with working-class voters has enabled Trump\u2019s electoral success \u2014 thereby imperiling American democracy<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For these reasons, the question of why<\/em> the culture war gained such political prominence has long preoccupied Democrats. Some progressives blame their party\u2019s alleged abandonment of economic populism<\/a>: By embracing \u201cneoliberal\u201d stances on trade<\/a> and regulation, Democrats narrowed the gap between the parties on economic issues, thereby making their divisions on social matters more conspicuous<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Some moderates, meanwhile, suggest that the party made cultural controversies more salient by moving too far to the left in such debates<\/a>. Others argue that the right\u2019s radicalization has made the culture war\u2019s primacy inevitable; it is hard to keep fiscal policy in the foreground when agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement are brutalizing US citizens<\/a> and the president is demonizing<\/a> all Somali-American-owned businesses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But recent research points to another (potentially complementary) explanation for the decline of materialist voting: Americans\u2019 at-home entertainment options have gotten too good.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At least, this is my takeaway from \u201cThe Business of the Culture War,<\/a>\u201d a new paper from a pair of economics graduate students at MIT and Harvard University, Shakked Noy and Akaash Rao, respectively.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Their study\u2019s basic story is simple: As the television business grew more competitive, news broadcasts began emphasizing culture war controversies, fueling a realignment of American politics in the process.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Noy and Rao note that, from the mid-1950s to mid-1980s, the three big networks \u2014 CBS, NBC, and ABC \u2014 dominated American television. Although cable TV existed, it had yet to fully penetrate American households and alternate channels were limited. Amid such scant competition, the major networks didn\u2019t worry too much about maximizing the entertainment value of their news broadcasts. Each had a nearly captive audience, who could be force-fed briefings on current affairs most evenings. The networks therefore viewed their news divisions as vehicles for earning prestige as much as revenue. And this led them to favor \u201chard\u201d economic coverage over \u201csoft\u201d cultural stories.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As coaxial cables brought an ever-expanding array of channels into American homes, however, the TV business started to change. By 1997, three 24-hour cable news networks were competing for viewers\u2019 attention \u2014 against not merely each other, but upward of 40 other stations. Critically, Fox News, celebrity.land, and MSNBC couldn\u2019t afford to treat their news broadcasts as \u201closs leaders\u201d like the networks had; news was their entire business. And these competitive pressures led all three to emphasize cultural issues over economic ones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Of course, the notion that cable news spotlights social controversies is hardly new (one can find that thesis eloquently elaborated in the 2013 cinematic masterpiece, Anchorman 2<\/em><\/a>). But Noy and Rao prove it empirically.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Analyzing recordings and transcripts from the past six decades of TV news, they show that cable networks dedicate a large majority of their issue-based coverage to cultural issues, even as broadcast news networks had historically favored economic topics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This editorial tendency appears to have been rational. Drawing on smart TV data that records when households change channels or turn off their televisions, Noy and Rao show that cultural topics are better at retaining viewers: When a network switches from an entirely cultural segment to a fully economic one, viewership falls by an average of 2.2 percent \u2014 about one-sixth of the click-away penalty associated with cutting to a commercial.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Notably, economic coverage was actually more effective at preventing a viewer from switching to a different news network<\/em>. But households that ping-pong between celebrity.land and Fox News comprise a small minority of the TV audience. And cultural topics are much<\/em> more likely to retain the attention of viewers deciding between watching the news and flipping on a basketball game, reality show, video game console, or any other diversion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the 2010s, as such at-home entertainment options proliferated, broadcast news began emphasizing cultural topics over economic ones for the first time, in an apparent concession to competitive pressures.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Voting](\"https:\/\/platform.vox.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/01\/Screenshot-2026-01-07-at-9.45.07%E2%80%AFAM.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0%2C0%2C100%2C100&w=2400\"\/)
<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nHow cable changed TV news<\/strong><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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