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But these voters are not being repaid for their support — more like the other way around.
Beyond the obviously wealthy voters, people who in many places are no more than upper middle class find themselves targeted to pay for a wide range of Obama policies aimed at leveling the economic playing field.
“The notion that people who are in those income brackets are Republican isn’t true anymore,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “In part,” he added, “that’s because of the way they made their money” — in high-tech, legal or service professions that skew liberal, rather than through traditional Main Street businesses that skew conservative.
ObamaÂ’s gamble that he can ask affluent progressives to pay more without complaint has been made riskier by the collapse of home prices and stock portfolios. Many well-to-do voters who may have been in a magnanimous frame of mind when they cast their ballots last November are not nearly so rich now.
“If Obama comes down more heavily on them, how will they react? Will their support fade? We don’t know the answers,” said Mark Penn, a Democratic strategist who conducted polling for the Clinton White House and advised Hillary Clinton in the presidential campaign.
Obama’s mild rhetoric about asking, “in some cases, those who are more fortunate ... to pay a little bit more” hardly constitutes class warfare to most middle-earning Americans. What’s more, he has delayed by a year his proposal to raise top rates back to their Clinton-era levels.
But within Obama’s policies there is a notable degree of class-consciousness — and a consistent strategy to target the costs and limit the benefits of Obama’s program for upper earners.