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 electorateAs 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:
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.
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:
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.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY