And these voters still outnumber ‘highly educated’ voters by a large margin.
During the past several election cycles, political pundits have devoted a lot of attention to the “diploma divide.” Much of this commentary has focused on the advantage Democrats enjoy among voters who tell pollsters they possess college degrees. It isn’t difficult to see why this topic has received so much scrutiny. The commentariat is dominated by college graduates who overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party. This also explains why so much of the self-congratulatory writing about the diploma divide tends to overlook its most consequential characteristic — that working class voters without college degrees far outnumber their “highly educated” counterparts.
They made a Faustian bargain with a man of limited mental capacity and less character simply to get rid of the Bad Orange Man.
As the Pew Research Center reported last week, “Voters who do not have a four-year degree make up a 60% majority of all registered voters.” A couple of decades ago, this would have been good news for Democrats. As recently as 2007, according to the Pew analysis, “56% of voters without a degree were Democrats or leaned Democratic, while 42% were Republicans or GOP leaners.” There has since been a 20 point swing toward the Republican Party, which now enjoys a 51 percent to 45 percent advantage among these working class voters. This clearly benefits former President Trump, as a New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday morning illustrates. Trump consistently polls far better than President Biden on the important issues that matter most to voters.
Predictably, the Gray Lady’s coverage of its own poll was characteristically disingenuous, heavily focusing on a modest uptick in Biden’s support that purportedly narrowed Trump’s national lead to one point. Among registered voters the head-to-head result was 46-45. Among likely voters the result was 47-46. The first four paragraphs of the article introducing the new poll squeezed as much verbiage as humanly possible out of those all but meaningless data. The editors of the Times know perfectly well that the 2024 presidential election will be decided by one or two of six swing states in which Trump holds modest but consistent leads. Finally, in the fifth paragraph, the Times gave its readers the unpleasant news:
Beneath the narrowing contest, many of the fundamentals of the race appear largely unchanged … Voters in the poll gave Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy almost perfectly inverted ratings: 64 percent approved of Mr. Trump’s handling of the issue as president and 63 percent disapprove of Mr. Biden’s job on the issue … Immigration gave Mr. Trump his other biggest edge among a host of issues voters were asked about in the survey. Border crossings hit record highs at the end of last year. A majority approved of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration as president, while 64 percent of voters disapproved of Mr. Biden’s job on those matters.
The poll’s crosstabs reveal an even more ominous picture for Biden when the responses of working class voters are separated from other registered voters. Trump’s approval rating on the economy rises to 72 percent among voters without college degrees, while Biden’s disapproval rating on the economy rises to 70 percent among these voters. On immigration, 55 percent of working class voters approve of Trump’s performance during his tenure in office, while 66 percent of these voters disapprove of the way Biden has handled the issue. With regard to the ever present age issue, 71 percent of working class voters say Biden is too old to be an effective president, while only 38 percent say the same thing about Trump.
What do the crosstabs tell us about those highly educated voters about whom we have heard so much? Biden fares a little better with these voters, but they’re not happy with him either. On the economy, for example, only 45 percent of registered voters with college degrees approve of the job he’s doing. On immigration, a mere 38 percent of these voters approve of Biden’s performance. As to the age issue, 66 percent of college-educated voters say Biden is too old to be an effective president. All of which means there isn’t much of a diploma divide where Biden is concerned. Neither working class voters nor their college-educated counterparts think Biden can do the job. Thus, even partisan hacks like Ezra Klein want him to step down:
I have this nightmare that Trump wins in 2024. And then in 2025 and 2026, out come the campaign tell-all books, and they’re full of emails and WhatsApp messages between Biden staffers and Democratic leaders, where they’re all saying to each other, this is a disaster, he’s not going to win this, I can’t bear to watch this speech, we’re going to lose. But they didn’t say any of it publicly, they didn’t do anything … I think Biden, as painful as this is, should find his way to stepping down as a hero. That the party should help him find his way to that, to being the thing he said he would be in 2020, the bridge to the next generation of Democrats.
The problem here is that “journalists” like Klein knew full well that Biden wasn’t up to the job in 2020, but they covered for him. They made a Faustian bargain with a man of limited mental capacity and less character simply to get rid of the Bad Orange Man. They evidently didn’t realize that, once Biden became President of the United States, dislodging him would be all but impossible if he did not want to leave. This man wields more power than the most delusional Roman emperor could have imagined, and he is surrounded by creatures whose influence and prestige will evaporate the moment he leaves office. Consequently, even if he wanted to step down, they will not allow him to do so. These people include the sainted “Dr. Jill.”
The good news is that working class voters still outnumber “highly educated” voters by a large margin. To paraphrase Jim Morrison, they have the hubris but we have the numbers. The math favors us, but not if we merely plant our posteriors on the couch and kvetch.
READ MORE from David Catron:
The Corporate Media Mocks ‘Double Haters’
Why Biden Is Bleeding Non-White Voters
https://spectator.org/trump-owns-the-working-class-vote/
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