Eighty-five percent of counties where a Whole Foods store is located voted for Joe Biden. This fact, reported by David Wasserman of The Cook Political Report, says something vital about the election – and about the Democratic Party today.
“Democracy,” as it was called in the 19th century, had long considered itself the party of the people, the defender of the little man, the party that stood up for people who were unable to stand up for themselves.
There was always something to it. From its founding until Andrew Jackson’s re-election in 1832, the Democratic Party has always been a coalition of groups who are not considered typical Americans but who together could form a national majority. Naturally, the exact composition of this coalition has changed over time.
Barack Obama’s Democratic Party was a coalition of the top and bottom, made up of both ends of the income, education and occupation scales. Obama, who as an Illinois legislator managed the highest and lowest districts for himself, provided substantive and psychological support for both sides.
Joe Biden’s Democratic Party has a different balance. The boy from working-class Scranton, as he was called, ran best not in factory towns but in college towns.
Its highest percentage in Michigan was in the county containing Ann Arbor, not Detroit. He ran better in Madison, Dane County, Wisconsin, than in Milwaukee County; stronger in Iowa City than in Des Moines; stronger in Missoula, Montana, with its university, than in Butte with its copper mines; as robust in metro Columbus (Ohio State University) as in metro Cleveland.
Biden’s strongest area in California was the San Francisco Bay Area (University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University). His strongest county in upstate New York was Tompkins (Cornell University). His strongest counties in North Carolina were Durham and Orange (Duke University and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).
White college graduates—Joel Kotkin’s “noble liberals” and Arnold Kling’s “highly educated elites”—became the dominant constituency of the Democratic Party. Even as descendants of party workers became Republicans under Donald Trump, the percentage of Democrats among white college graduates has skyrocketed.
A Pew Research Center poll found that in 1994, when Republicans took over the House after 40 years of Democratic control, the percentage of white college graduates ranged from 50% to 42% of Republicans, and in 2019 it ranged from 57% to 37% of Democrats. This happened even when we constituted a larger percentage of the electorate.
To which a former Democratic Party leader – Charles F. Murphy of Tammany Hall or Richard J. Daley of Chicago – would ask, “What do these people want?”
In the 1990s, the answers were quite obvious. Wealthy voters wanted lower tax rates and protection of leafy suburbs and fashionable inner-city neighborhoods from violent crime and welfare dependency.
Under the leadership of Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and Rudy Giuliani of New York, local Republicans and some Democrats cut violent crime and welfare rates by more than half. In Washington, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton aided and encouraged this process by largely freezing tax rates.
Today’s college graduates, more numerous than their 1994 predecessors and educated on increasingly “politically correct” campuses, do not have such specific goals. They don’t care about Obama’s marginal tax increases, and they don’t care – at least not yet – about the skyrocketing homicide rate following the May 25 incident in Minneapolis.
What they want from policy is not so much concrete as symbolic: a declaration of opposition to what they see as America’s “systemic racism” and opposition to claims of “America first,” whether that means enforcing immigration laws , or “xenophobic” restrictions on travel from China, where the coronavirus originates.
In the Democratic primary, these voters, as I wrote in June, “jumped from one candidate to another, leaning toward Sen. Kamala Harris after she slammed Joe Biden for opposing busing in the 1970s, then reveling in the senator’s stentorian assurances “Elizabeth Warren that on every issue, ‘I have a plan for this,’ and then swoon over the confident eloquence of then-South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.”
They seem to be chemically addicted to Donald Trump’s denunciations, so much so that subscription- and ratings-hungry media feel obliged to ridicule not only news outlets, but even food and movie review sites with the derisive words “Orange Man Bad.” Trump is routinely referred to as a “racist” with no evidence cited.
The core faith of White Democratic college graduates is to oppose the systemic racism of other Americans. Nearly a majority of them told pollsters they were concerned that Joe Biden is a white man in his 70s. According to Pew, only about 30% of black and Latino Democrats feel the same way. One group cares more about ethnicity and personal style than about real-life consequences for real people.
White Democratic college graduates complain that Trump is behaving childishly; is resistant to criticism and focused on symbolic curiosities; and doesn’t want to admit he was wrong or admit defeat. Honest criticism or self-description? Or both?
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
