An Election Map that Asks “What if Only Educated People Voted?” and a Follow-up Question
On Twitter, Basil (of “firebombing a walmart” fame) shows a couple of best-guesses at a couple of maps.
Here’s the best guess for “What if only people with a Bachelor’s or better voted?”
Here’s the best guess for “What if only people with Trade School or a Bachelor’s (or better) voted?”
Tracing Woodgrains shows us a map that tracks both the Education share gap and the Income share gap in 1996 versus the path the vote took from 2012 to 2016 to 2020 to 2024.
I don’t like how it skips over 2000-2008 but… look at that: 1996 and 2024 have swapped. In 1996, the Dems won low education/low income and Republicans won high education/high income and, in 2024, it’s the other way around.
He asks a very, very important question: if the Democrats are the party of the elites and people don’t trust the elites, what could change to make “party of the elites” trustworthy and competitive?
(Featured image is Basil’s original map.)
The big success of the US right over the last decade or so, helped by a cadre of centrists, is convincing a lot of people that the Democratic Party is whoever you think is the most radical, most annoying person on the internet. Therefore, voting Republican is a vote against them.- Nicholas Grossman.
The definition of elite in United States politics has been completely twisted beyond comprehension. Somehow the richest people in the world: Musk, Bezos, Zuckerbeg, Horowitz, Andersen, Thiel, Sacks, and other billionaires who bankrolled Trump are not elite. People with millions of dollars in wealth from owning car dealerships or paving contractor businesses or working in finance are not elite. The Winklevoss Crypto Twins are not elite despite attending the Greenwich County Day School, Brunswick School, and Harvard University.
But an adjunct professor at a community college who uses the term Latinx is one of the worst people in the world.
Great job at falling for propaganda people!Report
The difference between “educated” and “credentialed” is an important one, I think.Report
Are we looking for a “no true Scotsman” angle here?Report
More like this old Dilbert “certification” comic strip:
IT used to have a big problem with the whole MCSE thing. It still does, of course… but it used to too.Report
That Bezos is elite doesn’t change that the educated class is too.
elite
/ĭ-lēt′, ā-lēt′/
noun
1) A group or class of persons considered to be superior to others because of their intelligence, social standing, or wealth.
2) A member of such a group.
3) The best or most skilled members of a group.Report
If The American Dream is now seen as out of reach for many, it seems to me that we should not only be trying to increase people’s access to wealth, but also to education; that higher education costs have spiraled out of control is already one part of this, and now we have an Admin that is actively hostile to improving education for the masses.
IOW, if the Dream was that as Americans we could ALL theoretically be “elite” in some way – be it a rags-to-riches story, or by gaining knowledge and expertise and skills, even if those weren’t highly-remunerative (but still conferred satisfaction and and a certain amount of social status), then we’re clearly failing twice-over here; because now many people can’t get ahead, nor can they get educated.
Which brings us to the question Jaybird poses at the end:
Education, right? Turn the people who don’t trust the elites, into elites.Report
Which I guess, given the post title, is a tautology. So to be slightly more specific: defend, promote, support and financially-subsidize education. They may not trust those institutions currently, but if they’re made cheaper, they might be willing to brave them anyway and who knows, they might learn something despite themselves.Report
This is where we might get into “no true scotsman” territory that J_A alludes to above.
What does a college education actually look like, on the other side?
I mean, I’ve harped continuously about the whole “high schools graduating students who can’t freakin’ read” for a while now.
We’ve had conversations on this very site about students who graduate who don’t demonstrate proficiency…
If we do the same thing with a bachelor’s degree, we’re doing nothing but making bachelor’s degrees worthless… and that’s pretty bad timing for the whole “student loans” thing.
If we’re going to educate them, we kinda have to educate them.Report
Well, I said “defend and promote and support and subsidize education” not JUST higher education – so that seems to address what you’re talking about.
If kids are getting out of HS unable to read it seems likely to me that we have too many kids in classes with too few teachers, or crappy unmotivated teachers because we can’t attract better ones with more pay. Etc.Report
Increase the funding?Report
Yeah. Where I live we keep going the other way. I don’t think Elementary teachers should have to be providing all their own classroom school supplies and such, in addition to getting paid next to nothing. Pay them more, treat them with more respect, and you should in theory get on average better teachers and better education, right? If class sizes are too big, then we need more classrooms (or possibly creative scheduling to make better use of the rooms we have, but that’s maybe an even harder sell than just “more funding”, since parents still have to schedule around work and school both) and more teachers.
An uneducated populace seems like an objectively bad thing to me, regardless of your personal political leanings, unless you hope to actively exploit ignorance for political gain.
Because ignorance, in general, is expensive as heck too.Report
I’m not sure that’s the right metric. The divide is college and/or trade school. 90% of the population has an HS diploma.Report
Part of the problem is, for example, the Baltimore City school district is in the top quintile of funding and has massive numbers of schools where there isn’t a *SINGLE* student testing at proficiency.
My suspicion is “graft” but I’ve also been told that this isn’t really the teachers’ or administrators’ fault. We merely have an underclass that is incapable of giving their children the necessary building blocks that these teachers need to teach them.Report
I personally know a bmore city school teacher. From what I was told, I concluded: The union is corrupt, the administration is, generally, incompetent and bloated complying with all kinds of BS rules, the teachers are OK, the kids are not the best and brightest, and a LOT speak English as a second language. For the teachers, and at some point, it’s no longer a passion to educate, but a paycheck.
As long as these kids grow up in an environment where there are few decent paying jobs that don’t require a college education, other “opportunities” will always look better, and the cycle loops around again.Report
A bunch of the most lucrative other opportunities require skills, though!
Measurements! Use of a scale! The metric system! Bookkeeping!Report
Robert’s Rules Of Order!
So yeah, in Baltimore specifically, this looks a lot like The Wire, yeah? Little economic opportunity and a collapsed educational system as twinned and mutually-reinforcing failures. (And these are the same two often-but-not-always twinned paths to “elitehood” we are talking about here).
Baltimore, however, went reliably Hard Blue so “distrust of elites” doesn’t seem to have been an overriding concern for them, to the degree it explains the election results.
If we want to talk specifically about elite-distrust and what (if anything) needs to be done to fix it, Baltimore may be an outlier. My local schools are bad and getting worse, but I get the sense they aren’t Baltimore-bad, yet.Report
Well, this goes back to the whole “elite distrust” thing.
Who has been in charge of the schools for the last however many decades?
What has the trend been?
I’d say that the best way to re-establish trust would be for the elite to improve stuff rather than fail more slowly than they assure us their competition would be failing were they in their spot.Report
the trend has been for more racist sabotage of the government by hoarders and wreckers!Report
I don’t know what “increase people’s access to wealth” means.
I will say the big problem with the American Dream recently has been the increase in housing costs, but the solution there is to increase the supply of housing and we’re not willing to do that yet.Report
Related:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Gbzq3_0bQAATylt.jpgReport
Come on CJ – haven’t you learned these people don’t care about facts, only vibes that support their priors?Report
Report
Explains a lot.Report
This could be more of an aesthetic problem than an ideology problem. Liberal ballot measures pass easily even when local voters really hate Democratic politicians. Republican politicians tend to be more aesthetically pleasing in a hotheaded populist when than Democratic politicians, whose aesthetic is aimed more at the educated professional casts. The way forward would be finding politicians that are aesthetically pleasing to less educated voters while not pissing off the winemoms and dulcet toned NPR listeners.Report
I’ve long said that some folks here don’t really have politics at all, only aesthetics.Report
Liberal ballot measures pass easily because they involve clear benefits to the voters; for people voters go by vibes because politicians’ promises might not deliver the promised benefits, might not be implemented, might not even be attempted. Might as well vote for someone you like the look of (or, rather, not vote for someone you don’t like.)
The one time in recent memory a Democratic politician promised a specific policy–student loan debt forgiveness–voters went for it like all hell (the “white college graduate” demographic was what put Biden over.) And, to his credit, Biden did try to pay that back; it was basically the one coherent public-facing thing Biden fought for and kept fighting for even after the first attempt failed.
(And there’s always the old story about how in 1968, the people watching Kennedy-Nixon debate on TV thought Kennedy did better and the people listening on the radio thought Nixon did better.)Report
Improving aesthetics couldn’t hurt.
It might bruise the pride of this or that person but bruises heal and soon we’ll be in a place where they can ask “why do you still care about that? I stopped talking about that two months ago!”Report
Although I’d argue that all the pop-culture references and celebrity endorsements did, in fact, represent an attempt to improve Harris’s “aesthetics”. It’s not like Trump was all that attractive a person either.
But you could also argue that they were trying for the wrong aesthetic. They were trying to show Harris as cool, hip, with-it, up on the modern trends; but maybe they should have leaned into the “Copmala” thing that was floated ironically on Twitter for a few weeks after her announcement. “Harris: Busting heads since the 2000s.” “Harris: Didn’t get picked because they thought she was scary.”Report
Well, when Obama ran in 2008, it was *MAGIC*. Remember the Will.I.Am video? People listened to that and sobbed. There were so many celebrities that got on board but it felt like it was authentic.
It wasn’t merely Clinton vs. Dole and of course Sandra Bullock supported the Democrat.
It was, like, *ARTISTS* who came out and saw Obama as a muse. He represented looking in the same direction as the artists were looking, man.
Obama was fashionable.
And getting celebrities on board with Harris kinda felt like a cargo cult version of that.
Celebrities endorsed Harris because it was fashionable, not because she was fashionable.
(This also applies to Clinton in ’16, of course, but we were too close to it at the time.)Report