The Unbearable Lightness of White College Democrats
https://www.creators.com/read/michael-barone/12/20/the-unbearable-lightness-of-white-college-democratsEighty-five percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden. That factoid, relayed by The Cook Political Report's David Wasserman, tells you something important about the election — and about today's Democratic Party.
"The Democracy," as it was called in the 19th century, long thought of itself as the party of the people, the defender of the little guy, the side that stood up for the folks not able to stand up for themselves.
There was always something to this. From its formation to reelect Andrew Jackson in 1832, the Democratic Party has always been a coalition of groups not considered typical Americans but that together could form a national majority. Naturally, the precise composition of this coalition has changed over time.
Barack Obama's Democratic Party was a top-and-bottom coalition of those at both ends of the income, education and occupational scales. Obama, who, as an Illinois legislator, gerrymandered a top-and-bottom district for himself, provided substantive and psychological sustenance to both sides.
Joe Biden's Democratic Party has a different balance. The boy from working-class Scranton, as he is billed, ran best not in factory cities but in university towns.
The Democratic Party is becoming more White.
White college grads — Joel Kotkin's "gentry liberals," Arnold Kling's "highly educated elites" — have become the dominant constituency in the Democratic Party. Even as the descendants of the party's blue-collar constituents have become Donald Trump Republicans, Democratic percentages among white college graduates have ballooned.
Pew Research Center polling showed white college graduates 50% to 42% Republican in 1994 — the breakthrough year when Republicans captured the House after 40 years of Democratic control — and 57% to 37% Democratic in 2019. That's happened even as they've become a larger percentage of the electorate.
To which an old-time Democratic Party boss — Tammany Hall's Charles F. Murphy or Chicago's Richard J. Daley — would have asked, "What do these people want?"
