The voters who decide presidential elections are “are skeptical that government can produce full employment for the bottom-third of workers,” says Richard Parker, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Mass.
The last time poverty was a major issue in presidential politics was the 1960s, when President Lyndon B. Johnson instituted a national War on Poverty and Robert Kennedy made a poverty tour in Mississippi. While Mr. Obama’s health-care reforms could have a profound impact on the poor – and were clearly designed to help them – they were often couched in terms designed to appeal to the middle class.
Partly, that is because of what Mr. Johnson’s Great Society achieved. The programs led to a dramatic reduction in the poverty rate down to about 14 percent by the 1970s. While the rate has not declined since then, it has not gone up much, either, meaning the poor remain a significant minority of the population. Today’s rate fluctuates between 14 and 16 percent, says Professor Parker.
In addition, the poor consistently vote at much lower levels than other groups, says James Henson, a political scientist at the University of Texas in Austin. “People with low incomes have a harder time finding the time and getting out to vote,” he says. “They tend to be less directly engaged, and they have less political information pushed to them.”
Voting participation among the poor could decline further if voter ID requirements percolating in many red states become law, Professor Henson and other experts say. The obvious conclusion for campaign strategists: Why cater to populations that vote less?
But some analysts disagree with the idea that poverty being overlooked. The arguments between the left and the right often center on how to reduce poverty and its effects, says David Winston, a former Gingrich aide who now runs Washington strategy firm the Winston Group.
“Part of the Republican solution to poverty is economic growth,” he says. “For Democrats, it’s creating government programs. That discourse is clearly there and in the forefront.”
But subtle and intertwining factors make open discussion of poverty difficult in a presidential campaign.
“Americans are much more likely to explain poverty as the failure of the individual rather than the failure of society,” says Michael Emerson, co-director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research and a sociology professor at Rice University in Houston. “Our national narrative has been that you can be anything you want to be. So, if you are poor, it must be because you want to be.”
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