The Yawning Divide That Explains American Politics

[mahatmakanejeeves]

This article is on page A1 of this morning's The Wall Street Journal. There are many charts in the article, but because they are interactive, they don't link properly.

Just a note to people reading (and commenting on) the big piece @aaronzitner and I wrote for the WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-yawning-divide-that-explains-american-politics-1540910719 … A college degree has nothing to do with being “smarter.” However, statistically speaking, it has quite a bit to do with incomes and attitudes on issues.

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POLITICS ELECTION 2018

The Yawning Divide That Explains American Politics

Two groups of voters—white women with college degrees and white men without—have moved drastically in opposite directions, the WSJ/NBC poll shows

{snip}

By Aaron Zitner and Dante Chinni

https://twitter.com/aaronzitner
[e-mail]

Oct. 30, 2018 10:45 a.m. ET

To understand how American voters are being driven apart, look no further than two powerful demographic forces: gender and education. ... Once, the political outlooks of white men without a college degree and white women with one were similar. In recent years, the groups, which represent about 40% of voters, have moved sharply apart. Analysis of the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey shows the division to be at its widest since the poll began measuring it in 1994.

The gap is something new in American politics, and it has fundamentally changed how campaigns are waged. Once, white voters as a whole were “persuadable’’—they might have leaned toward one party or the other, but no big bloc within the group was out of reach. Today, as the chart below shows, a campaign for Congress in many places starts with 60% of college-educated white women favoring the Democratic nominee. An even larger share of white men without degrees favor the Republican—making both essentially unreachable by the opposing candidate.

{snip}

Among the women, the share who want Democrats to lead the next Congress is 33 percentage points larger than the share favoring GOP control. The men, by contrast, favor Republicans by a net 42 points. ... Facing a polarized electorate, many candidates aren’t spending time trying to win over the resistant group. This often happens in midterm elections but is happening now to an extreme. The divergence helps explain the issues at the top of each party’s agenda, and why some districts that were held securely by one party have competitive races this year.

A gender gap has been a durable feature of American politics, most easily seen in presidential election results. Since 1980, American women have consistently backed Democratic candidates for president at higher rates than have men, while men have favored Republicans—a gender split not seen in the earliest national exit polls, conducted in the 1970s.
....

—Brian McGill contributed to this article.

Write to Aaron Zitner at [e-mail] and Dante Chinni at [e-mail]

Appeared in the October 31, 2018, print edition as 'The Chasm That Explains U.S. Politics.'

[maxsolomon]

1. Unions used to alleviate this gap

By creating politically-educated men without college degrees.

Hence the importance to the GOP of destroying them over the last 40 years. Their well-funded schemes have worked, and not just in this area.

[wasupaloopa]

2. I agree with you. I grew up in Dayton Ohio in the 50's and 60's. It was a factory town. There was

NCR, Frigidaire, Chrysler Air Temp, Delco, Renolds and Renolds, many others and all had unions. The workers were almost always Democrats.

There was a worker-management cold war always going on. Workers drove Fords and Chevys. Manament drove Buicks, Pontiacs and Cadilacs. All white workers were racists for the most part.

Everyone knew their place and stayed in it. My mom use to preach that to me. To her we were working class and that was our place. My dad said to me that what you can expect out of life is to get a job on the line, get married, have kids, buy a house and a new car every three years. If you were real lucky you would buy a boat.

My older brother went to college and got a lower management position at NCR. All the men in the family got him in a room and attacked him for wanting to be "better than his old man."

We were never talked to about going to college though my brothers and I all got degrees on our own.

The racism came form lower class whites needing to have someone lower than they were.

Then electronics became big and the factories wanted to retrain workers to build newer electronic products. Workers refused to give up piece work jobs and the factories moved out. Gone were the unions also.

It is a long story but that's part of what I remember.

[maxsolomon]

3. Dylan lyrics from the early 60s:

A South politician preaches to the poor white man
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain
You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain
And the Negro's name
Is used, it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game

[malthaussen]

4. Interesting that the two graphs are virtually symmetrical...

... statistical illusion, or is there something there? At least until 2018, when suddenly...

-- Mal