| This illuminates two clichés of American political debate: first, the "elitist Democrat" idea, and second, the culture wars. Those who most resent the elite Democrats are themselves college graduates, and as Gelman recently has recently shown, the culture war is a split within the more prosperous and better-educated class, and not a split between educated liberals and ignorant conservatives. Democrats often speak of the religious right as hillbillies and trailer trash, but they're more likely to be well-off, complacent college graduates.
It's true, however, that the less educated a demographic is, the less likely it is to vote, and Obama's best demographic is also the one least likely to vote. Whoever wants to can argue that this show that stupid people indeed are the problem, but it makes much more sense to regard it as a Democratic and progressive failure. The low turnout also explains why the less-educated demographic is poorly served by its elected representatives, and at the same time this vicious circle is one of the reasons why the poorer and less-educated tend not to vote.
There's good reason to believe that the present Democratic Party is unenthusiastic about bringing in new voters (ACORN!!!) primarily because new voters would make inconvenient demands conflicting with the things Democratic pros need to do to massage their big donors. Furthermore, recruiting voters and getting out the vote is harder work than fundraising, and successful fundraising is what brings in the money to pay the pros.
Because the less-educated and poorer vote less, the Republican-Democratic battle is mostly fought within the educational/economic top third of the electorate, with the bottom two-thirds dragged into the struggle with various sorts of peripheral appeals but very poorly represented by either party. This situation is strikingly reminiscent of the Bourbon Democrat / Standpat Republican era (approximately 1870-1912), when the two parties were in substantial agreement on the big economic issues and were split only on ethnic and sectional grounds (Northern Protestants vs. Catholics and Southerners). As a result, during this era the great majority of the population (labor, and poor-to-middling farmers) were virtually unrepresented.
People who sputter about stupid voters tend to confuse two different groups: the hardcore crazified Republicans who make up about 30% of the electorate, and the 21% of the remainder that the Republicans need to win. These 21% are usually called independents or moderates, but most of them are low information voters - voters who can be talked into voting for hardcore conservatives even though they themselves are not very conservative or not conservative at all.
It's reasonable to call these stupid, but even they are stupid either because they don't have much information at all, or because they get their information from bad and dishonest sources.
I call them "ambient voters" - voters who make no effort to inform themselves but pick their political opinions out of the air (i.e., from free broadcast media and local scuttlebutt).
Whining about these voters is silly - you have to play the hand you're dealt. At the present time, ambient political opinion in the US is center-right to far right, and that's what we need to change. Since 2003 (Keith Olbermann) we've had a few center-left voices on the air, but radio and TV are still predominantly right wing, and the print media aren't much better. We have to realize that the media, by and large, are on the other team. They're not trying unsuccessfully to be good political journalists, they're triumphantly succeeding at being hack political journalists.
It's up to Democrats and progressives to do something about this, but so far they haven't. Compared to Republicans and conservatives, Democrats and progressives have done a terrible job of developing and propagating their message. For progressives, developing new media and new forms of communications is the most important task.
2.
Wonks with post-graduate degrees are a significant voting demographic playing a major role in the Democratic Party. 9.9% of the American adult population has advanced degrees, but because they vote more reliably than other groups they comprise 17% of the actual voters. 58% of the wonks voted for Obama and only 40% for McCain, and all told, despite their small numbers, they comprised almost a fifth of Obama's vote.
Besides voting more reliably than other groups, wonks also tend to be more politically active in many other ways, and since Democratic pros often are wonks too, wonks are doubly influential within the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, the wonk domination of the Democratic Party has caused a lot of problems. Even the political beliefs of many wonks are egalitarian at some level, during their ascendancy the views of the cultured elite have inevitably taken on an undue importance. Furthermore, wonks tend to have trouble communicating even with the stupid graduates of four-year colleges, to say nothing of even less-educated folk. The cool, superior, professorial, above-the-battle, anti-populist "let's not be hasty" approach may have worked in the fifties, but nowadays it annoys more people than it persuades.
Beyond that, wonks tend to spend their lives in academic, professional, and administrative environments within which open conflict and the expression of anger are taboo (though of course plenty of conniving and backbiting goes on behind the scenes). For this reason wonks tend to be strategically and tactically impaired (and not just rhetorically when talking to the voters), since their method is to use sweet reasons and civil argument to try to reach a civilized consensus on the right answer to questions rather than to engage in the kinds of competition, gaming, haggling and struggle whereby decisions emerge from bitter multi-player battles.*
The military and foreign-policy weakness many see in the Democratic Party is in part just an extrapolation from their feebleness in conflicts with their political enemies: as Bartcop says, "How can the Democrats protect America if they can't even protect themselves?" Thus, when Democrats cave in to Republican hawks on military questions, rather than making themselves look strong on defense, they just look that much weaker.
Most discussions of election demographics are carried on by political pros trying to bring their candidate or their party to victory. I'm not really sure that my suggestion of outreach to the less-educated and a more populist appeal will be immediately helpful to the Democratic pros that way. When I looked at the numbers and assumed that all educational demographics would vote at equal rates, instead of the most highly educated voting the most, I found that Obama would have gotten about 53% of the vote - about what he got in the actual election, 53%. Thus, a more populist campaign would require that the party to work harder to get about the same results, and why should the pros want to do that?
On the other hand, if what you're trying to do is to make the Democratic Party (and the United States) more egalitarian and more democratic, my suggestions will be useful. Furthermore, while it has been a dogma of American politics, ever since the fifties, that class is unimportant and that "status" (and subculture, and identity, and so on) are what really counts, I suspect that this is going to change. The idea was always more tendentious than descriptive, coming mostly from those who wanted to suppress class politics, and it was only at all persuasive because of a widespread conviction that everyone's future would be better than their present. If the present downturn is not temporary, but just the endgame a 30-year process of restratification, the optimistic illusion of classlessness seems likely to disappear.
3.
To an unfortunate degree, the Democratic Party has become the party of wonks, cultural elites, and expert administration, but this accounts for some of the party's weakness during the last forty years and I think that this problem will soon get worse. Our present and continuing economic problems are a wonk disaster -- the direct result of the bipartisan failure of our economic elite. But beyond that, if these troubles continue very much longer, a fair number of those with advanced degrees might find themselves joining the peasantry themselves, and sharing the common condition in ways which they did not expect and never would voluntarily have chosen. When that happens, they might be wanting pitchforks themselves.
* This is not true of Rahm Emanuel, bless his black heart, but Rahm unfortunately prefers to direct his guns at the left wing of his own party rather than at the Republicans.
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DATA
NO HIGH SCHOOL (Obama 63%): 14.3% of the population, 4% of the CNN exit poll sample.
HS DEGREE ONLY (Obama 52%): 31.6% of population, 20% of sample.
SOME COLLEGE (51% Obama): 25.3% of the population, 31% of sample.
BACHELOR'S DEGREE (50% Obama): 18.9% of population, 28% of sample.
ADVANCED DEGREES (58% Obama): 9.9% of population 17% of sample.
CNN Election 2008 National Exit Poll (breakdown of 2008 voting by education and the proportion of the actual voters from the various educational groups):
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/20...
US Census: Educational Attainment by Selected Characteristic 2007 (percentages of various educational groups in the population as a whole):
http://www.census.gov/compendi...
MORE LINKS ON EDUCATION AND CLASS
Open Left: Town and Gown (geographical variations in voting / education relationship)
http://openleft.com/diary/1605...
Will the Real White Working Class Please Stand Up?
http://www.emergingdemocraticm...
Bartels: What's the Matter with "What's the Matter with Kansas"?
http://www.princeton.edu/%7eba...
Crooked Timber: Not in Kansas anymore
http://crookedtimber.org/2005/...
The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/med...
Emerging Democratic Majority on Bartels on Frank:
The good news: "Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party," asks Bartels. "No. White voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more reliably Democratic in presidential elections..." The bad news: Bartels's definition of the white working class--white voters whose incomes put them in the lower-third of the household income distribution--is quite different from the prevailing definition of the white working class. In a broad version of the prevailing definition, the white working class consists of white voters whose education has stopped short of a four-year college degree. |
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