x01a Research Archives

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 electorate

As 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.