The Chattering Classes and the Voting Classes
The political talking heads on television have repeated this assumption:
(A) Working class Democrats are voting for Hillary Clinton, while educated, upper-middle class Democrats are going with Barack Obama. The Starbucks vs. Dunkin Donuts analogy has become popular.
The talking heads keep restating this claim without sharing data to back it up (are they asking for income, asset, and educational attainment info in exit polls?), and with no further explanation of why this supposed stratification has developed. It seems to me that the more elite the liberal, the more Hillary would feel like a comfortable fit.
(B) Looking at the spread of states where Obama won a majority of votes yesterday on Super Tuesday, he won the Heartland progressives of the "red states" (I know, he famously said that there are no red or blue states...), while Clinton took the Northeast and West Coast - where all the elite, latte-sipping liberals obsess over NPR. Here I am intentionally invoking another set of sound bite stereotypes the pundits have used to segment and define the Democratic base.
So my question is: how does the "working class/elite divide" assumption stated above in (A) jive with (B) the geo-demographic reality of Super Tuesday?
Does this mean that liberal elites actually live in the Heartland too? After all, Starbucks is as prevelant as McDonalds across the country these days! (Have the liberal elite left their political bubbles? Worse yet, might they colonizing the sacred Midwest and South? Is this a vast relocation electoral map conspiracy? If so, that would be a super smart move.)
Or does it mean that the assumption is wrong, and that Democrats of all classes are voting for Obama and Clinton, and are challenged in their decisions across the board?
No comments:
Post a Comment