Speaker 1: OK, next question is very related to the first one.
Are the college educated white voters actually becoming more liberal?
There's a very interesting dynamic that's going on here with college educated whites
I talk to you must have been about a month ago about the abandonment among some of the
Republican Party moving to the Democratic Party or moving to be independents who still
may vote for Republicans or whatever the case may be.
It is absolutely true that this has been a shift over time among college educated white
voters.
College educated white voters some decades ago leaned much more to the right, and it
was primarily for economic reasons.
The idea and this came up during the voicemail segment on Monday, the idea being college
educated people are more likely to make more money and they want to keep the money.
So they vote for Republicans because they see Republicans as keeping their taxes low.
And that's a very nice, concise little explanation.
And certainly some decades ago, there was probably a lot of truth to that.
However, we've now seen more college educated whites over time move in the direction of
voting for more and more Democrats.
I think that there are two things going on here.
Number one, although the Republican Party is still seen widely as the low tax party,
the daylight between the two parties has gotten smaller and smaller.
Now, I know Joe Biden now is talking about doubling the capital gains rate on people
making over a million dollars in all these different things.
But the vast majority of people don't make over a million dollars.
And so when you think about college educated Democrats or college educated voters making
between 80 and one hundred and eighty thousand dollars or something like that, they may actually
be realizing, you know, the very small difference in what I might pay in taxes under the Republican
versus Democratic plans is not enough to override all the other reasons that the college educated
white voter has been moving to the left.
And this includes social issues.
This includes cultural elements as well.
So while the economics are always reflexively what we might go to, social attitudes have
changed as well.
I mean, look at something like approval of Black Lives Matter in 2017.
If you polled white college graduates, do you support Black Lives Matter?
Twenty nine percent said, yes, I do.
That same poll right now has 40 percent of white college graduates supporting Black Lives
Matter.
That's an increase of almost thirty three percent.
Remember, not 30.
It's 11 percentage points, but about almost a third, about 30 percent that it appears
significantly overrides.
The top tax bracket is three points lower under the Republican plan.
And so that to me, seems like a major factor in what we've seen from college educated white
voters moving more to the Democratic Party.
The other thing also that may be going on is that as people simply become more politically
aware, they make more rational decisions about where they say they align before.
One of the things that Trump did and we saw it in absolute record turnout in twenty twenty
Trump getting way more votes than he got in 2016, Biden getting way more votes than anyone
has gotten.
So one of the things that we saw Trump do, for better or worse, is engage a lot of new
people.
And there are likely lots of college educated white voters who are recently out of college
who were in some nominal way kind of following the politics of their parents.
Maybe maybe you maybe had some really, you know, twenty one twenty two twenty year old
in college or college graduates that in 2015 were Republicans in some nominal way, but
maybe they didn't vote, for example, as they became more politically aware.
I'm not using the term WOAK, but as they became more engaged in politics during the Trump
era and they more understood.
Oh, wait a second.
Yeah, I don't know what my parents saw in the Republican Party, but I don't see it with
Trump.
I'm going to become a Democrat, for example.
I think that that's a factor as well, that sometimes you just have people who more as
they get more involved, they understand that whatever they were nominally identifying with
originally really wasn't for them.
And so that may be something you see in the numbers.
That may not not actually reflect the shift, it may simply reflect a change from not paying
attention to paying attention, some things to think about.
Let me know your thoughts on this.
One last question today,