The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait isn’t happy with Barone’s analysis:
“Basically, he’s taking a cultural mythology conservatives developed during the Bush era–to propogate the idea that Democratic voters are a tiny enclave of decadent intellectuals. … Is there any evidence that most, or even a singficant chunk, of Obama’s supporters are academics? I doubt it, and Barone offers none. Indeed, the whole concept is mainly a conservative anti-intellectual slur. …
“The Democrats-are-egghead-traitors genre of demographic analysis always contains massive analytic flaws. That’s inevitable when you’re trying to conflate a large (and often majority) segment of the electorate with a tiny, unrepresentative fringe. Barone’s latest effort is especially shoddy. The two most loyal constituencies in the Democratic race are older white feminsists for Clinton, and African Americans for Obama. Are the former really best understood as Jacksonians, and the latter as academics? Of course not.”
Not to sound wishy-washy, but both of these models are kind of true. Obama wins big in black regions and in college towns and Hillary has been dominating Appalachia and with women. How are the two mutually exclusive?
0 responses so far ↓
1 tom veil // Apr 4, 2008 at 11:47 am
The flaw is that Obama is not winning over the academics; he’s winning over the STUDENTS. Everything that I’ve seen so far indicates that college students who “vote their demographic” are voting Barack because they’re young, not because they’re anomalously well-educated.
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