He then ends up suggesting the reason they don’t like Harris is because she’s a woman -
“Because part of it makes me think – and I’m speaking to men directly – part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
Yes, obviously. The point is that the democratic party has consistently become more and more the party of white, affluent, and college educated people. That has not historically been the case, and democrats seem to get mad when people point out that their base is shifting.
And the super wealthy are like their own bizarro class. It’s quite easy to list off names of billionaire democratic supporters as well. I am talking more about Tesla owners (before Musk took the mask off) than the owner of Tesla, if that makes sense.
Here’s just one source but it shows the Dems’ lead over the GOP declining among white college grads between 2016 and 2020. But the Dems’ lead over the GOP among all college grads, of any race, increased between those elections.
Sure that’s only one source. Maybe there are polls supporting what you say, I dunno. I could be totally wrong with what I’m saying.
Thanks for sharing that source. While it shows a small decline in the Democrats’ lead among white college graduates, this is largely a blip compared to broader and longitudinal trends if you extend this further and bring it current. The rise of affluent, college-educated white voters in the Democratic base is well-documented, including in the sources I originally mentioned as well as Brookings, Politico, and Pew itself. This slight decline reflects specific dynamics in the 2020 election, such as a shift in voter focus toward economic issues and populist appeals. Overall, affluent, educated, and suburban whites continue to strengthen their role in the party, confirming the growing influence of white affluence in the Democratic coalition.
It’s strange to me that this fact is so upsetting to people. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a well-documented change emerging in the demographic base of democratic support.
Edit: look at non-college-graduate Hispanic support even in this small snapshot. It’s pretty wild, and it’s something democrats will have to contend with eventually. Ideally once Trump is out of the picture.
Fair enough, I guess there’s more than what I know, which is not much.
Hey, all else aside, I really appreciate you for constructively adding to the conversation and being so humble. In a post that took me a while to research and write that seemingly induced a lot of denialist-downvotes, it is refreshing to at least see someone willing to listen and think about it.
Well I’m just saying there’s certainly a lot of statistics I haven’t seen.
Also in the Pew polling I linked to, it shows the Democrat lead among black college grads increasing between the 2018 mid-terms and 2020. It’s only a 1 point difference but at least it hasn’t gone backwards.
Maybe the Dems are doing better with more educated voters, but not necessarily white ones. I dunno. I guess for these matters a person would have to see lots of data points to really understand the trends going on.
Just to be clear, saying you have humility was intended as a compliment.
College graduates, white people, suburban, and affluent people are four methods of categorizing people. One can belong to one, two, three, or all four of these groups. When we examine overall trends, it doesn’t make sense to only focus on a narrow time period, like two years from the past. Instead, if we want to understand trend projections, we need a longer range of data, ideally looking from 2014 to 2024. A smaller set of data can be misleading. For instance, if you looked at suicide rates between 1998 and 1999 in the U.S., you’d see a drop. But if you zoomed out from 1980 to the near-present, you’d see a clear and alarming upward trend. Focusing too narrowly risks missing the bigger picture. (The inverse is also true: if you looked at democrat’s base over 200 years, you’d be including when the were the party of slavers.)
Over the last decade, we’ve seen a notable shift in the Democratic base toward white, affluent, and college-educated voters. Traditionally, Democrats were the party of the working class and people of color. However, support among those groups has been slipping, while wealthy, suburban, and educated voters—especially in urban areas—have increasingly embraced the Democratic Party, particularly on cultural and social issues. This shift became more pronounced during and after Trump’s presidency, as many educated, affluent voters were turned off by his populist, anti-intellectual rhetoric.
Looking ahead, the trend seems to be one where Democrats rely more heavily on white, college-educated, and affluent voters, while their historical support from working-class voters and people of color continues to decline. Democrats will likely gain ground in cities and suburbs where these voters are concentrated, but struggle in rural and less affluent areas. This is a significant realignment for the party, which might face challenges reconciling the economic interests of these affluent voters with the needs of its traditional base, even as social and cultural issues increasingly become the glue holding this new coalition together.
Again, that’s not necessarily a problem in terms of the ability to get democrats elected. But it does present an unfortunate trend if you are concerned with your party representing those demographics. It also requires enough of the shifting composition to make up for the other declines in voters. Given how close almost all elections are these days, that’s no guarantee. And, as I noted, it also might create issues where democratic policies and platforms may need to prioritize one group of supporters over the other – though, arguably, that’s already been occurring, and seems like part of the reason for the shifting composition of the base.
Do you have any specific links that show this data? I’m just wondering really. I wonder what the trends with non-white college grads are.
Here are a few to get you started. I imagine you have some basic Python scripting skills, so you can start scraping data and aggregating the data into your own script.
You could also then pull the raw data from multiple polling aggregators in addition to the above and place them into your datasets in your script. That’s what I do. That would allow you a lot more flexibility in terms of running analytics, so that would be my suggestion.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-changing-demographic-composition-of-voters-and-party-coalitions/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/bridging-the-blue-divide-the-democrats-new-metro-coalition-and-the-unexpected-prominence-of-redistribution/3FD0D61D57DB06630D9046DC9348159D
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/4/9/democratic-party-suburban-shift
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patterns-in-the-2022-elections/
https://manhattan.institute/article/the-rise-of-college-educated-democrats
https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/the-transformation-of-the-american-electorate/
https://jacobin.com/2022/07/democratic-party-voter-base-biden-administration-rich-white-suburbs
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/06/growing-rural-urban-divide-exists-only-among-white-americans