Poll Analyst Nate Silver Says DSA Members are Highly Educated and Downwardly Mobile
“They’re gloomy about their own financial prospects, and feel aggrieved about the state of the country.”
Liberal polling analyst Nate Silver has crunched the numbers and believes he has found a distinct demographic that becomes attracted to the ideas of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). You may be unsurprised to learn that higher education plays a key role.
According to Silver, the DSA attracts people who are highly educated, yet lack upward mobility. They feel they are owed success because of their credentials. This makes perfect sense, and Silver is not the first person to reach this conclusion.
Silver writes at Substack:
The DSA occupies the high-education, lower-income corner of the electorate
As a result of contentious Democratic primaries in Michigan, Maine, and New York, I’ve been reading a lot of conversation about the role that class plays in voting patterns in the United States. In these primaries, candidates like Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed who are associated with democratic socialism often claim to have the mandate of the working class. But in practice, their strengths tend to be with college-educated voters. Even before his scandals, Platner wasn’t particularly doing better among voters without college degrees than previous (losing) Democratic nominees in Maine. El-Sayed has relatively weak support from Black voters in polls, meanwhile…
I’m reminded here of Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis. It basically argues that America is producing “too many” college graduates relative to the number of high-prestige, well-paying jobs available to them. People who wind up in this situation often carry heavy student loan burdens or other sorts of debt. Even if their material situation is objectively “just fine,” it’s rarely great. They’re gloomy about their own financial prospects, and feel aggrieved about the state of the country. Their class status is ambiguous: privileged in some senses, but they’re part of the “have-nots” in other meaningful ways.
Silver then shares this chart, which he also posted on Twitter/X:
Income and education are usually positively correlated. But sometimes the relationship breaks down. What's the most Democratic voting group in America? People with post-graduate degrees but lower-to-middle incomes. pic.twitter.com/pUp0pLSiGM
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 21, 2026
More:
Based on this grid, what is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year.
This is very much also the sweet spot for the DSA. In the group’s most recent member survey in 2021, 80 percent of members aged 25 or older had bachelor’s degrees, but 45 percent had household incomes below $60,000 per year.
This is unusual, because education and income are usually substantially positively correlated. In the composite CES data, only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that.
In today's newsletter, I argue this is the sweet spot for the DSA. DSA members are *very* college-educated (80% BA+) but *not* particularly well-off (45% HHI incomes below $60K). Their class status is ambiguous. But they tend to be very liberal on culture as well as economics. pic.twitter.com/yXAW5pVczi
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 21, 2026
As I said, Silver is not the first person to suggest this. Just two days ago on FOX News, Victor Davis Hanson suggested that these people are highly degreed but live in enclaves where they can’t afford to buy a condo and think they are owed something. Watch:
🚨 Dems Built The SOCIALIST Monster@VDHanson: "A lot of urban people think this message is cool because it promises them free stuff. But when you have Ro Khanna attacking capitalism while his wife drives a $200,000 Range Rover, Gavin Newsom living in a $9 million house, and… pic.twitter.com/AQsUbWEiuN
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 21, 2026
As Hanson says, this is not a movement like the Tea Party. It is a natural outgrowth of the left, which has become more educated, but simultaneously more burdened by debt because of it.
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Comments
The stuff of revolutionaries.
Well the globalist class hasn’t helped matters by refusing to hire Americans and replacing them with cheaper and more compliant H1Bs, However these socialist turds haven’t helped themselves by what they majored in. There are only so many barista slots for gender and woman studies majors.
They’re POORLY educated and downwardly mobile. If they had an actual education, they wouldn’t be socialists.
“According to Silver, the DSA attracts people who are highly educated,..”
*****
I agree, from observation the foot soldiers and many of the “elites” are poorly educated.
They may have spent 4-6 years getting a BA in a made up major but received no education. Watching short “on street” interviews, they lack basic education and language skills to convey moderately complex thoughts. There is a reason that that the SAT reading comprehension sections have been reduced from two to three paragraphs to two to three sentences.
“According to Silver, the DSA attracts people who are highly educated,..”
*****
I agree, from observation the foot soldiers and many of the “elites” are poorly educated.
They may have spent 4-6 years getting a BA in a made up major but received no education. Watching short “on street” interviews, they lack basic education and language skills to convey moderately complex thoughts. There is a reason that that the SAT reading comprehension sections have been reduced from two to three paragraphs to two to three sentences.
(The I agree is with Crawford not Silver)
When my now ex wife left Active Duty she went back to Univ. She’s smart and driven, a much better student than I. She was literally the #1 grad in her dept, College and was student Marshal at undergraduate graduate ceremony. The same for her Masters.
However she was in close contact with a bunch of late 20s/early 30s adolescents who kept deferring entering the ‘real world’ by exiting academia. When she was a.grad.student and working as a TA we got invited to the faculty meet and drink gatherings. I was amazed at how many of these goofs were working on a 3rd MA. Not a PhD but 3rd MA. These goofs were hanging out, earning a bit from TA salary, had benefits from Univ, subsidized housing and treated their student loans like an ATM. All of them were very leftist, whinging and moaning about West Civ, capitalism and Trump. None had any plans other than just coasting along on Uncle Sugars dime as long as they could.
Highly degreed, yet poorly educated.
Or they have no work ethic. A college degree does not guarantee a job in the field of study. There are jobs out there, just not the ones they want; and maybe they are unwilling to start at the bottom.
No wonder they show so much support for “tax the rich.” They ain’t.
“They feel they are owed success because of their credentials.”
The world doesn’t owe us diddly squat. We make our own success. The best case scenario is to find your passion and work like crazy to succeed. You many or may not get to the top, but if you sit around thinking you are owed success cause you have.a degree…well, good luck.
Correct. They may have a degree, but they certainly do not have an education. I bet all of them have simplistic coursework (gender studies, women’s studies, race based studies) and nothing solid like STEM courses.
As stated elsewhere. baristas, waitresses, bartenders, actors, servers, fast food workers, etc.
No wonder they want mandatory minimum wages of $20 to $25 per hour for menial entry level jobs.
They are, at heart, box checkers. “I superficially did the thing the rubric says so now I get an A” kind of mindset. They don’t understand the difference between “I did something that build value” and “I did something that usually indicates value has been built”. They think that checking the box IS doing the work.
I’d be mad too if I spent all that time and money in college and only made $70k!
If only they were well educated
…they could secure and maintain a high paying job and be able to payoff their student loans that Joe Biden promised he would forgive, but couldn’t.
Then they would be Capitalists, in deed even if they would never say the word.
Dumb people “educated” far beyond their intellectual abilities.
I believe the term is “credentialed”.
I was going to make a similar comment. There are not a lot of high-paying entry level positions for blue haired harpies with a Masters in Modern Poetry and a septum ring.
That is the real problem.
So overeducated people are unproductive and crave socialism. Gee!
Pol Pot had it right, for all the wrong reasons.
There are some flaws in this analysis.
One is that reported income is not always the same as actual income. Commies, in particular, (Or, if you want to continue the myth that there’s a difference, Democratic Socialists) are highly prone to corruption.
Another is that college degrees don’t tell you much about education. A hundred years ago they did but they don’t know. There are too many highly specialized degrees with little to no educational or societal value.
Lastly, I believe that narcissism (in the true psychiatric sense) is more likely to correlate with communist ideology than either education or money.
Biggest commie I knew in college bragged about working under the table so he didn’t have to pay taxes. Naturally he thought taxes were too low.
He worked!? I have never met a Marxist et al who had a real hourly job.
Highly CREDENTIALED. Not highly educated. Not even moderately educated.
Like all leftists, He’s trying to gloss over exactly WHICH ‘highly educated’ academic degrees they have.
Worthless ones. Gender studies, African studies (pretty much any XYZ Studies), Art, journalism, political science. ‘Degrees’ which taught them absolutely zero actual skills that could get them a job.
EXPENSIVELY credentialed, too.
Exactly so. Worked for a while with a guy who got his Masters, and then got one of those “evenings and weekends” PhD’s. He was a buffoon who would do things like get up and stand by his chair during meetings “to stay alert”. As far as I could tell that was the only thing he learned through his extensive education, as I never (over a period of two years) heard him contribute anything in a meeting or email exchange.
Very much an example of credentials without content, and this at the PhD level. The situation is far worse in the undergraduate realm where many schools are offering remedial math and English courses to freshmen. How the hell do people who are not at High School senior level even get into college to begin with?
“In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college.”
Joseph Sobran
In the Mass Bay Colony students learned Latin and Greek in grammar school. Entrance to the university required that.
I learned early on in my career as a manger that degrees listed on a resume are useless. HR people like them, but it says nothing about the person’s character or ability to do the job.
Opposition to price gouging is the test of true mis-education. You find it even on the right.
They are credentialed – not educated.
Maybe we can find a way to redirect their energies. Instead of smashing the system, which doesn’t get them an extra penny, they should be suing their alma maters for fraud, like the DeVry crowd did.
Those students WON, and it wasn’t one of those class actions where you get a check for $9.95 and a free year of identity protection — many (my son was one) got their entire loan debt erased AND a refund of anything they had paid on it so far, which was a serious chunk of change.
They majored in Hate America Studies, from Hate America professors at Hate America University. Of course they can’t make good money but still they think they’re the smartest people around. Would be extremely frustrating.
Comical how silver spoon revolutionaries con and hoodwink the self-described geniuses
Downwardly mobile? lol
“Downwardly mobile” is progressive politically correct speak that defines unemployed and unemployable today’s young democrat voters.
I wonder how this might also apply to terrorists and terrorism. The attackers on 9/11 were all well-educated. Where they also under-employed? And did that have anything to do with their radicalization?
In other words: LOSERS.
They’ve been preyed upon by an academic industry that’s been built and run by their fellow leftists. Yet they lash out at Republicans who have largely left them alone to do whatever the hell they wanted over the last three decades. The
Democrat plantation of being indebted to their handouts has snared too much of our population. It’s well beyond time that the Republican base stopped waiting for leadership to do something and started taking jobs in the schools and media apparatus that enables this phenomenon. Bring back the American values proudly from within the same way the Democrats worked to destroy them.
The only thing Nate’s ever been right on was Clinton. However, he’s close here. These are self-loathing liberals.
Being downwardly mobile is one of the criteria for acceptance into the DSA Club. But first, have a college degree, preferably Ivy League.
This has been a long time coming. As far back as 50 years ago, students who studied mathematics and physics knew that there were very few decent jobs available, and so many of them went into professions like law and medicine. Those who became college professors or high school teachers could hardly be called downwardly mobile even though they were earning at relatively low scales. The difference today is that a college degree has become debased by allowing it to be granted for so-called majors in nonsense and radical opinion. All that can be expected of people who get those degrees that command neither earning power nor respect is resentment.
Medicine is still strong. Law is overrun with diploma mills.
You learn something new everyday. I never knew that Highly Educated meant dumber than a bag of hammers
They are highly “educated”, are doing far worse than their parents – but often still get support from their parents. This is a dangerous combination. These people know how to do political organizing and action, and they have time on their hands as a result of that parental support. So you have tens of millions of aggrieved losers who have enough support to be able to devote substantial time to political causes. This is the raw tinder for revolutionary fires, and this will not end well.
Turchin’s theories are based on on over 5000 years of human history, going back to early Chinese dynasties. Societies tend to decompose very rapidly when they hit a critical mass of elite overproduction. Lots of angry aggrieved people with political means never has a happy ending.
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