Spurred on by some of the comments in my On Courage essay, I thought I’d bring a new debate to the floor. Rather than discussing the differences between urban and non-urban voters, let’s discuss the difference between white college educated voters and white non-college educated voters. And rather than offer any theory for the following stats (.pdf), I’ll let others take their shots at explaining them. I’ll only say that the stats show something going on that defies purely economic explanations. And it offers up food for a lively debate between the camp that sees Democratic salvation in economic progressivism and the camp that prefers a strategy of appealing to social conservatism.
Conclusion: the more voters looked like hardcore members of the white working class, the less likely they were to vote for Kerry in the 2004 election. That’s a problem–a big problem–that Democrats have to take quite seriously.
For those that want a few more sources:
The only explanation I can come up with is the right wing hustle that Thomas Frank writes about in his book “What’s the matter with Kansas?”
Perhaps this does tie into your previous posting. Very educated persons are used to thinking theoretically. They still think “me, me, me” like everyone else — but engaging them in a conversation about something that is purely theoretical (to them) is easier. So a highly educated suburbanite finds it easier to understand someone coming at things from an urban perspective even though he can only understand the urban argument from a “theoretical” perspective since the life experiences don’t match his life. He doesn’t tune the other person out. (Of course, this is a gross generalization — many people don’t have formal educations but are still able to think theoretically. They are well read. My recently deceased grandmother who had a highschool education comes to mind. )
I have a friend who fits into the demographic mentioned as going heavily for bush and he does indeed vote that way. I have had many friendship-stressing arguments with him over the past several years. As best I can tell, he has no patience for complexity. He prefers “a dollar is a dollar is a dollar” and “fair taxation” to the more complicated truth that a single dollar is more valuable to a poor man than a rich man.
He also has absolutely no brain circuitry for sympathy. He would rather execute a few innocent people than let one murderer go unpunished. He doesn’t seem to mind forcing some people into life-long crippling debt as a result of catastrophic health problems in order to catch a few bankruptcy abusers. Because he has a nice middle-class existence with no college education, he can’t understand why everyone else can’t do it. He has racist tendencies as well.
He loves his anger at others who are not like him, or those who are less fortunate. It makes him feel superior in a world that constantly reminds him of his inferiorities.
He seriously stresses my ability to consider him a friend, but he is attentive and considerate to me. I am, of course, a white male like him, and heavily involved in the same industry. We have many common interests. I work on trying to move him off the dittohead opinions he has, but it has been very hard work. Sometimes I think I’ve made him think a little bit, but then it’s back to talk radio for him.
Bottom line for me is:
College and the general valutation of knowledge tend to separate those out who can’t understand complexity and reinforce the abilities of those who can understand complexity. If you are a white male and you go to a college where persons of color may out-perform you, you begin to wonder why they don’t get the good jobs. You also begin to grasp that everything is not “on or off”, that there are varying shades of interpretation of the complexities of society, and that it is awfully hard to achieve absolute certainty about anything. Real education removes absolutism from one’s opinions and makes absolutists very uncomfortable. The absolutists who do go to college go with an agenda to try to force academia to regurgitate their own beliefs back to them. At college, you also find out that your understanding of the world, and your place in it, is indeed inferior to the understanding and placement of others, at least in fields outside your own area of concentration. The grading systems in institutions of higher learning are not perfect, but they do tend to reward effort and understanding in the long run.
Of course, one could write many books exploring the issue, and many books have already been written. From my POV it is awfully difficult to try to put my ideas about the topic into a short format like this. My musings here only scratch the surface, and are definitely disorganized. Oh well, at least I’ve put in my two cents on the diagnosis. The real problem is not the diagnosis, but trying to figure out the cure.
Perhaps sympathy induction treatments would be a good place to start. I say give ’em all a pair of the other guy’s mocassins and make ’em walk a couple hundred miles….
I’d like to see a regional breakdown of the data. White people in the South v. North v. West v. Midwest. These numbers are still insufficient by themselves imo.
The hidden assumption in most analyses of these statistics is that college-educated people think better than non-college educated people. I think that assumption is bogus.
Let’s look at these groups more carefully.
Non-college educated whites with $30,000-$50,000 in household income tend to respond to appeals to “values”, “heritage”, “tradition”, and “patriotism”. These are the people that Nixon began splitting away from the New Deal coalition, using the wedges of the anti-war movement and subtle appeals to racism.
Who the non-college educated whites with $50,000 to $75,000 in household income depends on where they live. These are different groups in the Bay area of California and in Bay City, MS. They include a lot of self-made entrepreneurial small businesspeople and small farmers. In less affluent parts of the country, these are the “I made it on my own without a college education, why can’t they?” bunch.
College-educated people with household incomes of $30,000-$50,000 are the ones who have been most affected in income by Bush’s policies and have gotten the least benefits (if any) of tax cuts. That they split with a 49%-49% tie is striking. These are people who are so strapped financially, compared to their expectations, that they are the least likely to be paying attention.
College-educated people with household incomes of $30,000-$50,000 are likely to be techno-libertarians, high-value sales (real estate, business-to-business sales, etc.), management, and so on. There are a lot of true conservatives in this bunch.
I think the conclusion that the white working class is a big problem is too simple a conclusion. Those figures that are closer to 50% are more troubling than the figures in which Bush predictably had large margins.
This is an interesting analysis, TarheelDem, but I wish to differ on one point. If college education does not help people think better, what does it do? If the purpose of education is only to teach a trade, it is not really a college, but a trade school. I still believe that many of our institutions of higher learning seek to do better than that. Teaching and nurturing critical thinking skills, research skills and healthy skepticism is still supposedly the goal of a good college education at many of our institutions of higher learning.
I agree that a college education is not absolutely NECESSARY for the development of critical thinking and research skills, but I hope that we still have at least a few institutions where the goal of “better thinking” is not lost.
If college education does not help people think better, what does it do?
My best guess right now: Defer to authority. Learn to give the answers that the authority wants to hear. Learn to sacrifice your dreams because of one weedout course. Critical thinking skills, research skills, and healthy sccepticism are the purpose of only a few colleges and universities (and not necessarily the most prestigious ones either).
We do still have a few institutions where the goal of “better thinking” is not lost. But based on the survey, very few.
I just checked out your website and I really like it. We share a lot of common interests and opinions.
As for the topic at hand, I do agree with you that colleges and universities have dumbed down to match the poor results coming out of our high schools. However, I do believe that 12 to 17 percent, depending on income level, is still significant, and probably due to “better thinking” as a result of college work and the college environment. And, as shirlstars suggests further down this thread, some might allocate an additional 3 to 5 percent due to the “diebold effect”.
As you say, many college educated folks are now really tradespeople, not “well educated”. Computer Science degrees and Business degrees are often chosen by folks who have no interest in knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but who are really just there to learn a trade. It is also interesting to me that I have seen other surveys that show that people with more and more advanced degrees swing more and more to the left. (Sorry no citation here – I don’t have the time to google at the moment, but I do seem to recall such surveys. I’m not positive exactly when and where I saw such a survey or surveys, nor can I vouch for their methodologies, but I distinctly remember the reported trends.)
So, I still can’t agree with you that explanations of college educated voters as being “better thinkers” are totally bogus.
. . . the camp that sees Democratic salvation in economic progressivism and the camp that prefers a strategy of appealing to social conservatism.
Why are those two mutually exclusive? Gotta admit I have a hard time with this level of analysis – just no clear reference points. My Attila-the-hun, white, college-educated (MA), right-wing-combat vet-Republican cousin and I agree on a variety of economically “progressive” issues. But when we talk about those issues we tend to use terms like “fairness” and “basic needs”.
He agrees that it is necessary for society as a whole to mandate a base wage, and agrees that universal health is preferable to the system we have now. Further, that neither side of that counterfiet coin we call “republicans” and “democrats” are what they appear to be. We also feel like we’re the “independent” voters that may very likely determine the outcome of the elections in ’06 and ’08.
If the democrats would spend more time simply putting together a clearly defined set of principles, tied to specific legislative remedies that comport with the majority of the voting public’s needs, those cellular breakdowns would nearly disappear.
If I say I want an “increase in the minimum wage”, I’ve pulled a 30-year-old trigger phrase that pushes too many people back to Reagan’s nest. If on the other hand I advocate fairness in the market place, and question the wisdom of paying people more for public benefits than work, the perception is likely to change with any audience.
Democrats need to lose the damn wonks, and actually beat pavement for the next few months. Truth is we have more valuable exchange of ideas here, and in small house-and-bar gatherings, across so many more political lines, than I’ve seen in all of the bullshit coming out of both party headquarters in the last ten years.
The argument was never about some of us. It has always been about all of us. Why is that such a f*cking hard concept to grasp?
I’m evil to Nascar Reddynecky types down here. All I say is that according to all the studies the more intelligent one is the more likely they are to vote leftish. Then I smile real simple-like and carry on with whatever I was doing.
A]mong non-college-educated whites with $30,000-$50,000 in household income, Bush beat Kerry by 24 points (62-38). . . among non-college-educated whites with $50,000-$75,000 in household income, Bush beat Kerry by a shocking 41 points(70-29)
I’m assuming that the 30-50k range is defined a “working class” and the 50-75k range is defined as middle class.
So if 38% of the non-college educated working class voters voted for Kerry but only 29% of the middle class non-college educated voters voted for Kerry, how do you get:
Conclusion: the more voters looked like hardcore members of the white working class, the less likely they were to vote for Kerry in the 2004 election.
It looks to me like the working class non-college educated voters were more likely to vote for Kerry by 38% to 29%. The more money non-college educated voters make, the more likely they were to vote for Bush. Am I missing something here?
I think the stats are tricky.
And that is what I’m hinting at.
I don’t want to break my promise to leave the theorizing to the community on this one.
But…
What this shows is that a college education makes one more likely to vote for Kerry if you are have a low to moderate income.
It also shows that the more successful a non-college educated person becomes financially, the less likely they are to support Kerry, and by much bigger numbers than the same income bracket of graduates.
So…
Does this indicate that working class families are reacting to gays and abortion and God? Or does it indicate something else?
for these different demographics?
30 years ago, high school grads in these income ranges were likely to be in a union, not so anymore.
It’s like my brother in law.
He could have easily become a wingnut, but he’s in the union, and that’s changed him, he hates Bush, with a passion.
This demographic has a lot of successful tradesworkers in it. I spent some years working in the trades before going back to college. Nobody I met was a liberal. Many were critical of the Republicans, but most everyone voted that way regardless.
The general sense was that the Dems had no reference for these people, thier lives, etc. “They don’t know who I am.” This almost always came down to the meme of the self-made/self-reliant man.
Thinking about this now, it occurs to me that it’s about respect. Floating just beneath the surface was the idea that Democrats do not respect people who work for a living.
Interestingly, I could usually get poeple to see the purpose and even the need for programs like welfare. I think that a lot of the problem is that back in the mid-90’s, the Dems just didn’t bother fighting back. They just conceded that welfare was a problem in some nebulous, prejudice-ridden way. Now, nobody sees why the thing existed in the first place.
belong to unions are the very ones who vote against their own interest because they are afraid of blacks, women and foreigners.
People who belong to unions are far more likely to vote for democrats than any other white demographic.
You’re very, very wrong in promoting a stereotype here that union members are secretly republicans, hating the working class is the reason that democrats lose. If we are going to be a working class party, if we are going to win, talke like this putting down working people needs to be called out for what it is: Bigotry.
soldiers of the democratic party true enough. I wasn’t putting the unions down. But if you look at the demographics of voting the individual union member who is white and male will often vote against his own interest.
The differences that surprise you are explained in one word. . . .Diebold.
Enough said.