by Democratic voters comprise a multiracial but predominantly white group of college graduates and a larger group of non-college voters. The non-college share of the Democratic coalition is split about 50:50 between white (of which non-college whites are such a large share of the American population that they accounted for fully one-third of Joe Biden’s voters, despite voting overwhelmingly for Trump) and non-white individuals. It is overall much less liberal on a range of issues, especially social and cultural ones. And this divide has important implications for Democratic Party politics. This working-class wing provides the majority of the votes, but the college grad wing provides essentially all of the staff, including in the White House and on Capitol Hill. But also in the agencies, at
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Democratic voters comprise a multiracial but predominantly white group of college graduates and a larger group of non-college voters. The non-college share of the Democratic coalition is split about 50:50 between white (of which non-college whites are such a large share of the American population that they accounted for fully one-third of Joe Biden’s voters, despite voting overwhelmingly for Trump) and non-white individuals. It is overall much less liberal on a range of issues, especially social and cultural ones.
And this divide has important implications for Democratic Party politics. This working-class wing provides the majority of the votes, but the college grad wing provides essentially all of the staff, including in the White House and on Capitol Hill. But also in the agencies, at the Super PACs, at party-aligned nonprofits. College graduates also dominate the media, not just in the sense that the media is made by college graduates, but in that media made for college graduates is considered prestigious and highbrow in a way that local TV news or the Joe Rogan Experience is not.
That is Matt Yglesias in Slow Boring.
It would be easy to say “the activist wing of the party is ignorant of these facts.” But I don’t think that’s right. A lot of party elites recognize that the median democrat (let alone the median voter) doesn’t share their views. They don’t overestimate how much others think like them by too much. And they are strategic and mercenary enough to try to carry them along. Because they want to win elections. This strikes me as a good description of most Presidential candidates and near-candidates, including Biden and Clinton and Sanders.
The average person, however, doesn’t have someone reminding them every 15 minutes that they have to win the next election. So it’s easy to lose your theory of mind, and start to think other members of your party think and feel as you do. This projection bias is a pretty normal human thing to do.
I have to wonder if this bias is more common than before—a product of our real life bubbles and social media streams. That’s also the easy and alarmist thing to say. But it might be true. Later in the piece Yglesias writes of the survey data:
While cultural issues are the primary driver of the degree divide, more educated people are just more ideological and more “consistent” than working-class people. They know the right answer to the labor union question, so they give it more consistently.
Ideological consistency isn’t quite the same thing as projection bias, but it’s easy to imagine they reinforce one another.
Overall, this makes me think Democrats have gotten (or will get) a little worse at winning elections.