The Democrats' Biggest Problem: College-Educated White Liberals

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Sep 29, 2005
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Surfing the Oceans of Liquidity
This is from a Democratic pollster.

Basically, unless the Democratic party moves away from their wokeness pushed by white liberals, they are going to have great difficulty winning power.

Intelligencer turned to our favorite socialist proponent of ruthlessly poll-driven campaigning, David Shor. A veteran of the 2012 Obama campaign, Shor is currently head of data science at OpenLabs, a progressive nonprofit. We spoke with him last week about how his analysis of the 2020 election has changed since November, what Democrats need to do to keep Congress after 2022, and why he thinks the Trump era was great for the Republican Party (in strictly electoral terms). ...​
At the subgroup level, Democrats gained somewhere between half a percent to one percent among non-college whites and roughly 7 percent among white college graduates (which is kind of crazy). Our support among African Americans declined by something like one to 2 percent. And then Hispanic support dropped by 8 to 9 percent. The jury is still out on Asian Americans. We’re waiting on data from California before we say anything. But there’s evidence that there was something like a 5 percent decline in Asian American support for Democrats, likely with a lot of variance among subgroups. ...​
One important thing to know about the decline in Hispanic support for Democrats is that it was pretty broad. ...​
Roughly the same proportion of African American, Hispanic, and white voters identify as conservative. But white voters are polarized on ideology, while nonwhite voters haven’t been. Something like 80 percent of white conservatives vote for Republicans. But historically, Democrats have won nonwhite conservatives, often by very large margins. What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives.
And so this leads to a question of why. Why did nonwhite voters start sorting more by ideology? And that’s a hard thing to know. But my organization, and our partner organizations, have done extensive post-election surveys of 2020 voters. And we looked specifically at those voters who switched from supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Donald Trump in 2020 to see whether anything distinguishes this subgroup in terms of their policy opinions. What we found is that Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.

This lines up pretty well with trends we saw during the campaign. In the summer, following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.​

"Defund the Police" was a disaster for Democrats, particularly amongst non-whites.

More.

Over the last four years, white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party. ... Democrats have traded non-college-educated voters for college-educated ones, white liberals’ share of voice and clout in the Democratic Party has gone up. And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us. ...

Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off. Most voters are not liberals. If we polarize the electorate on ideology — or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology — we’re going to lose a lot of votes.


Excellent article.
 
Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off.

I've said multiple times to white leftists on this forum that we just love them white people telling us what we're supposed to be offended by and that they really really should keep doing it.
 
This is from a Democratic pollster.

Basically, unless the Democratic party moves away from their wokeness pushed by white liberals, they are going to have great difficulty winning power.

Intelligencer turned to our favorite socialist proponent of ruthlessly poll-driven campaigning, David Shor. A veteran of the 2012 Obama campaign, Shor is currently head of data science at OpenLabs, a progressive nonprofit. We spoke with him last week about how his analysis of the 2020 election has changed since November, what Democrats need to do to keep Congress after 2022, and why he thinks the Trump era was great for the Republican Party (in strictly electoral terms). ...​
At the subgroup level, Democrats gained somewhere between half a percent to one percent among non-college whites and roughly 7 percent among white college graduates (which is kind of crazy). Our support among African Americans declined by something like one to 2 percent. And then Hispanic support dropped by 8 to 9 percent. The jury is still out on Asian Americans. We’re waiting on data from California before we say anything. But there’s evidence that there was something like a 5 percent decline in Asian American support for Democrats, likely with a lot of variance among subgroups. ...​
One important thing to know about the decline in Hispanic support for Democrats is that it was pretty broad. ...​
Roughly the same proportion of African American, Hispanic, and white voters identify as conservative. But white voters are polarized on ideology, while nonwhite voters haven’t been. Something like 80 percent of white conservatives vote for Republicans. But historically, Democrats have won nonwhite conservatives, often by very large margins. What happened in 2020 is that nonwhite conservatives voted for Republicans at higher rates; they started voting more like white conservatives.
And so this leads to a question of why. Why did nonwhite voters start sorting more by ideology? And that’s a hard thing to know. But my organization, and our partner organizations, have done extensive post-election surveys of 2020 voters. And we looked specifically at those voters who switched from supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Donald Trump in 2020 to see whether anything distinguishes this subgroup in terms of their policy opinions. What we found is that Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.

This lines up pretty well with trends we saw during the campaign. In the summer, following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. So I think you can tell this microstory: We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.​

"Defund the Police" was a disaster for Democrats, particularly amongst non-whites.

More.

Over the last four years, white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party. ... Democrats have traded non-college-educated voters for college-educated ones, white liberals’ share of voice and clout in the Democratic Party has gone up. And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us. ...

Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off. Most voters are not liberals. If we polarize the electorate on ideology — or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology — we’re going to lose a lot of votes.


Excellent article.
We can only hope the Dems wise up. When we really only have two viable choices and they've both gone crazy, it doesn't leave us any real voice, does it?
 
One thing I've wondered all along is if minorities voted Republican for the great economy T**** gave them prior to Covid. Maybe they were looking at Covid being temporary and wanting lots more jobs, like they had prior to the pandemic. It's just a thought. Everyone keeps saying, a good economy keeps the incumbent in power.

I don't disagree with what Shor said. The cancel culture and a bunch of other stuff has gone way too far. It might not be the only thing at work, though.
 
The democrats are so over-excited now that they will sprint en masse right off the map to the left.

I agree. Midterms are going to be interesting. The Democrats believe they will be able to hold their majorities because of the Capitol riots and QAnon conspiracies (which most people have never even heard of), but the public has a short memory. Ultimately, it will come down to the same set of issues it always does. "It's the economy, stupid!"
 
One thing I've wondered all along is if minorities voted Republican for the great economy T**** gave them prior to Covid. Maybe they were looking at Covid being temporary and wanting lots more jobs, like they had prior to the pandemic. It's just a thought. Everyone keeps saying, a good economy keeps the incumbent in power.

I don't disagree with what Shor said. The cancel culture and a bunch of other stuff has gone way too far. It might not be the only thing at work, though.

If COVID hadn't hit I would bet Trump would have been reelected pretty handily, barring some other reason for an economic downturn.
 
One thing I've wondered all along is if minorities voted Republican for the great economy T**** gave them prior to Covid. Maybe they were looking at Covid being temporary and wanting lots more jobs, like they had prior to the pandemic. It's just a thought. Everyone keeps saying, a good economy keeps the incumbent in power.

I don't disagree with what Shor said. The cancel culture and a bunch of other stuff has gone way too far. It might not be the only thing at work, though.
Progs telegraph a lot of what they are going to do. And people fall for it when it happens. With Repubs lying to their voters or dragging feet and shoving left leaning candidates to them also, trust in government is low. Repubs could have done so much more over the years. A just small percentage of cuts and minor changes in programs would have added enough to shore up our economy and budget.
 

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