The Fundamental Problem of the Democratic Party:

From Party of the Working Class to Party of the Well Educated

  

Mainly Macro (click here) is a blog by a British economist, Simon Wren-Lewis, and often spot-on.  In today's blog he goes through the exercise of showing how in France, Britain, and the US, leftist parties have drifted toward electoral bases in the well-educated populations.  Much of his blog goes through this, and is worth reading.

As you can see from the graphs, the Blue USA line is the most pronounced trend in this direction among the three countries.  One out of four votes for "the left" comes from voters in the top 10% most-educated voters.

Compounding this trend are some of the optics:  Nancy Pelosi often appears to personify the highly-educated (not to say, know-it-all) voter, full of statistics and facts and talking points, but unable to communicate with a former labor union member who got fired in a "downsizing" and now has trouble finding a job that pays $15.00 per hours.  Bernie Sanders, although himself an "East Coast Liberal," and socialist, understood that the cultural appeals from the Right were more attractive to this hypothetical (but very real) voter than the appeals to "diversity," identity politics, and other non-bread-and-butter bones tossed at them by the Democratic Party.  Most important, cultural conservatism was threatening to replace the electoral base of the Democratic Party.  For making this clear, as he gained momentum over Hillary, of course, he was punished by some dirty play in the dark alleyways of the Democratic National Convention, and has been pretty much ignored since then.  No other prominent Democrat, certainly not in the Senate or House, has made many moves to occupy this space.  The vacuum has been filled largely on the Right, with everything from White Supremacists to Fundamentalist preachers, to the NRA.

Wren-Lewis Compilations