Politics of the Welfare State

1. Krugman says that these policies of the New Deal were synonymous with political moderation by the time of the 1950s because by then, things such as the Great Depression (which drastically lowered confidence in big business) and World War II (which got the government involved in the economy in a positive way) had enabled the ideas of the New Deal to take root and to flourish (largely free from any kind of government corruption).
2. Krugman claims that as more and more of the large number of immigrants (who were most often poorer and thus supported things such as the welfare state) in the United States became citizens, the voting population was significantly changed towards a more Democratic viewpoint.
3. The South supported the Democrats because it was not nearly as rich as the North and had much to gain from the New Deal policies.
4. Table 2 is showing both how many of the minority party are to the opposite side of the most extreme member of the majority party (measuring overlap) and also how many of the minority party are in a sense on the side of the majority party (measuring crossover); in the 85th Congress, according to this Table, there was much more overlap and crossover than in the 70th or 108th, meaning that there was a stronger political center. Table 3 shows the proportion of voters who were white that voted Democratic according to their income class; there was less variation in the ‘52-’72 years than in the ’76-’04 time span (in other words, less of a tendency for the rich to vote Republican, also presumably showing a stronger political center in the first time period)