We’re exactly two weeks out from election day, although about 15 million Americans have already voted. That’s just wrong. I don’t like early voting. I think we should all go back to voting on one day. I live in my own world on this one. Leave me alone.
Digression aside, I came across this one slide from a presentation by Doug Sosnick, a political consultant who cut his teeth with Bill Clinton. I think it says all we need to know about why this election is so close and why we’re so divided as a nation.
Okay, so it’s hard to read, I know. But the fine print does’t matter. What matters is that the lines represent average levels of education for each state. The more educated a state is the longer the line. Massachusetts is on top and Mississippi is on the bottom. Wisconsin is near the middle. And the colors, of course, represent how each state votes, blue for Democrats, red for Republicans, purple for toss-ups.
It’s the pattern that is so painfully obvious. The more educated a state is the more it will vote for Democrats. So, when Trump said he loved the uneducated, he had good reason to.
There are lots of ways to parse the electorate and by now we’ve seen pretty much all of them from some analyst, pollster, pundit or academic. But the one that has become most consistent, enduring and obvious is education. The more years of education you have the more likely you are to vote for Democrats, regardless of race, gender, income or age. In fact, the erosion of Democratic support among Black and Latino voters is taking place pretty much exclusively among those voters without a college degree.
And here’s the thing. As a Democrat with a college degree, I lament this. Mine is supposed to be the party that looks out for workers. My party was built on people who worked with their hands. And now we’ve got this uncomfortable disconnect where we still talk as if we’re the party of workers when we’re really the party of the faculty lounge.
NPR Democrats need to ask themselves why, if we’re the party that cares about blue collar workers and have policies that benefit them. they’re leaving us in droves. The simple answer is that we don’t share their values and we come off as self-righteous and condescending.
There’s a reason that Republicans have latched onto the inconsequential issue of biological men playing women’s sports. It hardly ever happens and it doesn’t matter all that much when it does compared to real problems, but it speaks volumes about the culture gap. Is it literally true that transgender issues in sports matter more politically than who supports a living wage? Yes, that is literally true.
This gap will be there after November 5th no matter who wins. And it poses a struggle for people like me. I’m a Democrat. I’m college educated. But I don’t like what my party has become. I could never be any part of the party of Donald Trump and yet I don’t want to belong to a party of NPR liberals either.
This won’t get resolved with the election, though I like the way Harris and Walz are tackling it during the campaign. If they should win, job one will be to keep playing to the middle and to resist becoming captive to the cultural agenda of the hard-left.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
I don’t understand why you have determined that education equals part of the faculty lounge and condescension. I am offended by your generalizations of educated people and Democrats. What if it’s more about how easy it is to appeal to the worst of human nature in uneducated people? Which is exactly what Donald Trump does. What if it is also just easier to manipulate and scare uneducated people? Maybe I’m just less likely to believe a blanket statement like: Crazy Kamala is bad for religion, Catholics, Evangelicals, etc., but uneducated people are not. What if they just care more about money than morals or people? What if people who can look past all the horrible things Trump has said and done are more like him than not. If the tables were turned and Kamala was a felonious thug spewing hate and denigrating people, I would absolutely not vote for her. I won’t vote for anyone I wouldn’t even consider buying a car from.
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Honest question: Back in the 80’s and 90’s, when almost everyone voted on Election Day, were there usually not long lines? (I mean more than an hour etc)
My perception is that, with the notable exception of blatant voter suppression via Jim Crow etc, voting didn’t used to be much easier.
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There were long lines for November elections. But I just heard from a friend in Milwaukee today — the first day of early voting — that the line to vote today was at least an hour and a half at City Hall. I know we’ll never go back, but the main thing I don’t like about early voting is that it reenforces the idea that it’s all about red/blue and has little to do with the actual candidates. The idea is that you’ve got your mind made up before the ballots are even printed — and nothing that happens in the last couple of weeks of the campaign will change your mind.
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I think you could use this same graph and list of states for the 1960-70s but substitute union membership. Unions in the post-war period created middle class wealth which allowed The Greatest Generation to send Boomers like me to college. We graduated with the idea that we would never have to work with our hands. Unions also got a rap for racism. By the 80-90s, college educated Boomers wanted foreign cars and cheap electronics and furniture and didn’t notice when Northern factories closed to be replaced by nonunion factories in the South paying much better than other jobs in the South – including those needing college degrees. Boomers still think NAFTA was perfect.
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Honestly? Trump is just an old school shock jock taking his show on the road. That’s it. A lewd entertainer. He provides an opportunity for people to vent about the petty insults they’ve been hearing from the identity politics advocates for nearly a decade. The man has no integrity but he gets wrapped in it by association by saying the stuff people think out loud in key words and stuffed in between is garbled riffing junk that nobody actually listens to.
Lots of people don’t have time to pour over the NYT or listen to Morning edition or All Things Considered and if they have they often got and still get a blast of the worst of ‘woke’ era energy — a great cause that unfortunately has pretty much managed to insult just about everybody in it’s execution. This is a terrible shame (and that’s the handywork of the highly educated isn’t it?).
Thank goodness Harris and Walz get it and are truly leading a forward looking campaign.
But it’s our fellow Americans who don’t have time to do deep dives into the news that can’t see the creepy people behind the Trump movement. So is that their fault? The NYT and NPR hardly cover them. It’s all Trump Trump Trump, in every headline, covering the smokescreen guy ad nauseum but never really showing us who the real creepers are.
All for clicks and sales figures on the rise. The educated left has plenty to answer for in this instance.
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So are we being corrupted by higher education?
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No, but I do think those of us with college degrees shouldn’t look down on those who haven’t picked up that piece of paper. I don’t. I’ll be you don’t. But too many of us do. I hear it from friends, I hear it on NPR and sometimes in the New York Times and other outlets. I think it’s something that blue collar voters can feel. A more less open hostility to their values.
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I think college contributes to “looking down”. Many professors are proud Marxists. They have now taught for generations that the US is racist, oppressive, colonizing, sexist, etc. The result is an elite who look down on the “deplorables”, the unconverted heathens who are too dumb to get it.
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