What are your thoughts about Uneducated voters for Obama or Romney?

[All Along The Watchtower]

Define "educated."

[All Along The Watchtower]

Having said that, I would like to see the data that the most poorly educated whites are more Pub than those who have some college or a college degree. I challenge that.

There's a difference between individual voters and aggregates.

[All Along The Watchtower]

The Dems are a curious coalition of the dumbs and the smarts.  Pubs tend to be in-between.  Pubs tend to think as a crude generalization that they are the "normal" Americans. Pity for them that a majority of American voters are now "abnormal."  

The Pubs need a new business plan. They are heading towards politically insolvency in tandem with the nation's fiscal insolvency.

This is... simplistic. The Democratic coalition is not "dumbs" and "smarts". It's highly educated voters and voters with little education. Education and intelligence are not the same thing. Moreover, the odd multi-polar split where Democrats win low- and high-education voters while Republicans win those in the middle is entirely the result of race. Minorities have disproportionately less education and vote heavily Democratic. If you look only at white voters by education, the trend is clear: more education = more Democratic.

You just don't understand opebo-speak is all.  We speak a unique dialect of English on the Atlas forum. You will get used to it. Having said that, I would like to see the data that the most poorly educated whites are more Pub than those who have some college or a college degree. I challenge that. The Dem strength is concentrated at the high end among those with graduate degrees, including, inter alia, all those disgusting lawyers who feed off the frictions in our economy, often ones government generated.  So the Pub strength among whites should look more than a concave function generated curve I would think.

In 2008, Obama lost college-educated whites by 4 points and non-college whites by 19 points. I don't have the full-spectrum breakdown (for splitting post-grad v. college only and splitting no-high school v. high school only v. some college), but you can guess. The below article suggests that 2012 might have had an even bigger education gap (and the swings in Appalachia would also point that way), but a quick search does not give me an exit poll with the white vote by education (also, since the national exit polls this year only included 31 states, it's not directly comparable).

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/103969/obama%E2%80%99s-problem-white-non-college-educated-voters-getting-worse#

"In 2008, Obama lost white college graduates by four points and whites without a college degree by 19 points." (It's buried in the middle of the article.)


This... rather comprehensive breakdown of college v. non-college whites (which they call "working class") from September also has Romney leading by 2% among college whites but by 13% among non-college whites (since Obama declined among whites rather than improving, and those are both better than 2008, it's probably understating Romney): http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/WWC-Report-For-Web-Final.pdf

Do those articles make distinctions between white high school graduates who have never attended college  and those with some college or an Associate's degree?  Also, do "whites with college degrees" include those with graduate degrees?  That'll skew it more Democratic if so.

[All Along The Watchtower]

The young first time voters are not the uneducated ones.  They have far more access to information than older Americans.

Information =/= education

[All Along The Watchtower]

The Dems are a curious coalition of the dumbs and the smarts.  Pubs tend to be in-between.  Pubs tend to think as a crude generalization that they are the "normal" Americans. Pity for them that a majority of American voters are now "abnormal."  

The Pubs need a new business plan. They are heading towards politically insolvency in tandem with the nation's fiscal insolvency.

This is... simplistic. The Democratic coalition is not "dumbs" and "smarts". It's highly educated voters and voters with little education. Education and intelligence are not the same thing. Moreover, the odd multi-polar split where Democrats win low- and high-education voters while Republicans win those in the middle is entirely the result of race. Minorities have disproportionately less education and vote heavily Democratic. If you look only at white voters by education, the trend is clear: more education = more Democratic.

You just don't understand opebo-speak is all.  We speak a unique dialect of English on the Atlas forum. You will get used to it. Having said that, I would like to see the data that the most poorly educated whites are more Pub than those who have some college or a college degree. I challenge that. The Dem strength is concentrated at the high end among those with graduate degrees, including, inter alia, all those disgusting lawyers who feed off the frictions in our economy, often ones government generated.  So the Pub strength among whites should look more than a concave function generated curve I would think.

In 2008, Obama lost college-educated whites by 4 points and non-college whites by 19 points. I don't have the full-spectrum breakdown (for splitting post-grad v. college only and splitting no-high school v. high school only v. some college), but you can guess. The below article suggests that 2012 might have had an even bigger education gap (and the swings in Appalachia would also point that way), but a quick search does not give me an exit poll with the white vote by education (also, since the national exit polls this year only included 31 states, it's not directly comparable).

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/103969/obama%E2%80%99s-problem-white-non-college-educated-voters-getting-worse#

"In 2008, Obama lost white college graduates by four points and whites without a college degree by 19 points." (It's buried in the middle of the article.)


This... rather comprehensive breakdown of college v. non-college whites (which they call "working class") from September also has Romney leading by 2% among college whites but by 13% among non-college whites (since Obama declined among whites rather than improving, and those are both better than 2008, it's probably understating Romney): http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/WWC-Report-For-Web-Final.pdf

Do those articles make distinctions between white high school graduates who have never attended college  and those with some college or an Associate's degree?  Also, do "whites with college degrees" include those with graduate degrees?  That'll skew it more Democratic if so.

No; it doesn't make such distinctions. However, "no college" and "some college" (all races) were almost identical in the exit polls (51-48 Obama and 49-48 Obama, respectively), and the former contains a lot more minorities than the latter, so draw the proper assumptions. "No high school diploma" was only 3% of all voters, so we're not going to get statistically significant figures for whites, who are less than 50% of "no high school diploma" adults (and probably also of "no high school" voters).

On the other end, yes, post-grads are included in "college" whites. However, their inclusion would not be enough to make the difference. If we adjust the college whites to the overall population results and then separate out a 61% Obama group for post-grads (who are mostly white, so this is an okay way to measure it but will result in overestimating Romney to the extent there are non-white post-grads), you end up with college-no-grad-school whites being about Romney + 10, still significantly less than no-college-degree whites.

OK, so what's your point in all this? White college graduates have trended Republican since 2008 (2010 midterms and 2012 election). Obama won post-grads of all races by 18 points in 2008, compared to 13 points in 2012 (according to exit polls, may not be the exact numbers but the trend should be correct).

I think people are extrapolating too much based on a couple of elections. The McCain/Palin ticket was unusually ill-suited to the college-educated for a Republican ticket. Yet this year, many affluent white suburban counties that voted for Obama in 2008 swung hard against him. I think this is just the process of regression to the mean.