The increased dominance of college-educated white people in the Democratic Party poses a major threat to party cohesion, a new paper argues.
Democrats are now more likely to be dominated by college-educated whites, whose progressive political priorities diverge from the more socially conservative non-white wing of the party. Due to their high levels of political participation and wealth, the remaining white Democrats will have an outsize influence on the direction of the party and its agenda.
By prioritising “post-material moral issues” like climate change, January 6th and immigration amnesty, argues researcher Zach Goldberg, Democratic elites risk ignoring “kitchen-table issues” like crime, inflation and gas prices. This creates an “awkward paradox” for the leadership because the Democrats are expected to become a majority-minority Party in the near future.
In 2020, for the first time on record, the college-educated white share (27.3%) of Democrats exceeded that of non-college-educated whites (25.2%), but it is the former group that wields the most influence in the Party. One reason Goldberg lists is white Democrats’ higher level of political knowledge and participation than other racial groups, which is illustrated by the table below. Higher levels of political attention give white Democrats a “first-mover advantage” on political issues, which allows them a greater say in shaping public opinion and outcomes:
In conjunction with this finding, white voters are also more likely to donate to the Party, giving them an ear with Democratic bigwigs. These donors are typically “far more” liberal on social issues like capital gun control and abortion as well as globalism (i.e. immigration and free trade), and this access won’t be disappearing anytime soon: “at existing rates,” Goldberg writes, “it could take hundreds of years before whites no longer constitute the majority of large Democratic donors”.
Over the coming years and decades, these trends are expected to endure, if not intensify. Between 2020-22, the chasm in the Party only widened further, which became evident during the 2022 House midterms when Democrats were asked about their single most important issue. Here white Democrats were around three times as likely (34.6%) as nonwhite Democrats (11.5%) to say abortion or climate change whereas nonwhite Democrats were nearly twice as likely (44.5%) as their white counterparts (25.6%) to select economic issues like inflation or taxes.
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