Biden's Base

This bit is about the Biden college debt forgiveness program,though it takes its time wandering over there:

She's got an impressionistic understanding of something sort of real, but the thing it overwhelmingly runs on is pretending that nonwhite Democrats don't exist or aren't really part of the polity.

— Woke Mob Just Want to Have Fun (@Yastreblyansky) August 29, 2022

That is, to the extent Democrats seem richer to Catherine Rampell, it's because she can't remember there are any Black ones. Although she's also completely wrong either way, as Bouie points out.

It's the same pattern you see in the commonplace picture of American Christians as consisting of a deeply rightwing majority dominating a rump of liberals in what used to be called the mainline churches. It's based on ignoring the existence of a large Black church overwhelmingly committed to the social gospel; when you count those, most Christians are actually on the left. This is still truer since 2020, when the number of (conservative) white evangelicals dipped, at 14%, below the number of (liberal) white mainliners, at 16%. Add to the latter the 7% of the population who are (liberal) Black Protestants, and divide the total 22% Catholics (white, Hispanic, and other "of color") between the two (more Catholics identify as Democrats than Republicans but it's not a huge number), and you get a total of something over 34% of Americans on the relative Christian left compared to something under 25% on the Christian right—far more, with the Christians "of color" making the main difference.  

You read it here first.

Via PRRI Research.

With Democrats and Republicans, I'm not going to try to do the real numbers, but the argument would go like this: 

There's a parallel to the stereotype picture of white Christians in the stereotype picture of white voters going back to the Nixon administration, as divided between a Republican Silent Majority (outgrowth of the anti-busing protests of the late 1960s and the 1970s, when white Northerners learned to their astonishment that the law required them to desegregate their school systems too) and a noisy minority of Democrats who might think of themselves as having higher aspirations toward being smart or cool, in emulation of Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. That's the origin of the stereotype of Democrats as "élites", in Republican resentment at being culturally outclassed by that particular bunch of white guys.

But Democrats already represented a demographic diversity—back into the 19th century, really, when they were simultaneously a party of immigrant factory workers in the Northeast and rural whites in the South—and became still more diverse after the civil rights changes of the 60s brought most people of color into the party and drove many white racists out, until the present point, in which Democrats are mostly people of all ethnicities in more or less urban settings, with a very wide range of educational attainments and socio-economic status, while Republicans are overwhelmingly white people mostly in more or less rural settings with a narrower range (especially at the low-income end: poorer white people are the most likely to be politically disengaged and unaffiliated and not vote at all). 

The big lesson of the 2020 exit polls is that Democratic voters are now decidedly better educated but decidedly less wealthy than Republican voterss:

Voters of color are a big reason for the disjunction: there's still lots of injustice in our world, and many people of color aren't receiving the traditional payoff of a college degree. The college premium has been shrinking pretty drastically for white graduates as well, Millennial and younger. Younger voters of all races are better educated than ever before, but few of them have gotten rich.

(Meanwhile, many older white voters got rich back in the day when you could do that without a college degree, which wasn't all that long ago, and that's who made up the margin of Trump support, while the well-educated but ill-paid young of all races and the well-organized Blacks of all ages and educational statuses won it for Biden.)

But a pundit, in particular a conservative pundit like Catherine Rampell, can't wrap her head around this. In her world, all Democrats are Pajama Boy, so she just looks at the first number, on educational attainment, which confirms her bias, and falsely assumes that tells the story about income as well. 

I'll add that, in the debate over student debt (which was where Rampell boarded the train), that's what it is actually about: young Biden voters, Black and white, who feel cheated by the educational system which told them they could borrow their way through school and have economic security forever. They really were cheated, for one thing, and it was especially so at the lower levels of debt (for two-year and four-year state and municipal schools and even worse of course for the scam schools like Corinthian and Phoenix), and by that very same token for Black and Latino kids who weren't going to borrow six figures anyway. Not for the imaginary gender studies and basket weaving and "Lesbian dance theory" students, and not for the doctors and lawyers either, whose financial calculations may have been better founded, but for much more modest career goals. And for another thing, Biden and the Democrats really do owe them, in the best political sense, because the young-of-all-races and Blacks-of-all-ages are an absolutely vital part of the coalition.

It's about the base, but not the base you imagine: it's young of all races and Blacks of all ages and their families, who aren't affluent, because the traditional college-to-security pipeline has failed them.

— Woke Mob Just Want to Have Fun (@Yastreblyansky) August 30, 2022