Eighty-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 those not able to stand up for themselves.
There was always something to this. From its formation to reelect President Andrew Jackson in 1832, the Democratic Party has always been a coalition of groups not considered “typical” U.S. residents but which together could always 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.
Biden’s Democratic Party has a different balance. The boy from working-class Scranton, Pennsylvania, as he was billed, ran best not in factory cities but in university towns.
His highest percentage in Michigan was in the county containing Ann Arbor, not the one containing Detroit. In Wisconsin, he ran stronger in Madison’s Dane County than in Milwaukee County. He ran stronger in Iowa City, Iowa, than he did in Des Moines, stronger in Missoula, Montana, with its university than in Butte with its copper mines. In Ohio, he ran just as strongly in metro Columbus (Ohio State University) as he did in metro Cleveland.
Biden’s strongest area in California was the San Francisco Bay (Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley). His strongest county in Upstate New York was Tompkins (Cornell University). His strongest counties in North Carolina were Durham and Orange (Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
White college graduates (Joel Kotkin’s “gentry liberals” and Arnold Kling’s “highly educated elites”) have become the dominant constituency of the Democratic Party. Even as the descendants of the party’s blue-collar constituents have become 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. In 2019, they were 57% to 37% Democratic. That’s happened even as they have 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?
In the 1990s, the answers very fairly obvious. Affluent voters wanted tax rates held down, and they wanted their verdant suburban and trendy central city neighborhoods protected from violent crime and welfare dependency.
Led by Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson and New York’s Rudy Giuliani, local Republicans and some Democrats cut violent crime and welfare rolls by more than half. In Washington, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton assisted and encouraged this process and largely froze tax rates.
Today’s college graduates, more numerous than their 1994 predecessors and schooled on increasingly “politically correct” campuses, don’t have such concrete goals. They’re unfazed by marginal Obama-era tax increases and untroubled (so far, anyway) by the vertiginous increases in homicides after the May 25 incident in Minneapolis.
What they want out of politics is not so much anything concrete as it is symbolic — for example, public expressions of opposition to what they regard as America’s “systemic racism.” They want to see opposition to assertions of “America first,” whether that means enforcement of immigration laws or “xenophobic” restrictions on travel from coronavirus-originating China.
In Democratic primaries, these voters, as I wrote in June, “flitted from one candidate to the next, tilting toward Kamala Harris after she whacked Joe Biden for opposing busing in the 1970s, then luxuriating in Elizabeth Warren’s stentorian assurances that, on every issue, ‘I have a plan for that,’ then swooning for the assured articulateness of Pete Buttigieg.”
They seem chemically dependent on denunciations of President Trump, to the point that subscription- or ratings-hungry news media feel obliged to lard not just news but even food pages and movie reviews with “Orange Man Bad” sneers. Trump is routinely described as a “racist” with no evidence cited.
White college Democrats’ central tenet of faith is that they oppose other people’s systemic racism. Almost half, 49%, of white college Democrats told Pew’s poll takers that they were bothered that Biden “is a white man in his 70s,” as compared to only 30% of black and Hispanic Democrats. One sees more concern about ethnic origin and personal style than for real-life consequences for actual people.
White college Democrats complain that Trump acts childishly, is impervious to criticism and fixated on symbolic trivia, and refuses to confess error or admit defeat. Fair criticism or self-description? Or both?
