Pollster Nate Silver breaks down who makes up the DSA.

by Rob Roper

This week the famed pollster and certainly no conservative Nate Silver, founder (but since departed) of FiveThirtyEight and now author of the Silver Bulletin, published an article breaking down the financial and racial demographics of who makes up the Democratic Socialists of America. What he discovered is that the party’s “sweet spot,” to use the term from his title, are the “highly educated, downwardly mobile” members of our society. In other words, our modern socialists are by and large those born on third base and somehow managed to get thrown out trying to steal second. Not exactly the kind of people you want running a lemonade stand let alone a city, state or country.

They are also disproportionately white. 85 percent according to Silver, which, he notes, is neither representative of the country as a whole and even less representative of the overall Democrat Party. So, despite attempts to paint the movement as blue collar and racially diverse, it is, when you peel away the propaganda, the opposite of that. The curtain is ripped down, and it turns out the Great Oz behind it is just a white dude (or dudette) with a lot of college but is somehow earning less than $60,000 a year. More exactly, to quote Silver, “It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year.”

You see this pattern with the Graham Plattner debacle: a guy who managed to turn a boarding school education opportunity at the uber-elite Hotchkiss (from which he was, shocker, expelled) into a “career” gathering oysters for his mommy’s restaurant. AOC graduated from Boston University with a double major in international relations and (I find this hard to believe) economics and wound up tending bar. Zohran Mamdani has a degree in (I find this easy to believe) Africana studies from Bowdoin and parlayed that into short-lived career as a failed rap artist. Their hero is Bernie Sanders, who never spent a useful day in his life.

Though Silver avoids getting into the psychology of these folks, I’ll give it a gander. They’ve been trained and brainwashed by their school experience, not just college, to expect praise and reward simply for holding and expressing certain politically correct or “woke” attitudes which, it turns out, the world beyond academia and professional activism could give a rat’s fanny about. They are focused on what Silver calls,

…“post-material” cultural issues such as gay rights, trans rights, the environment, race relations and Israel/Palestine — as compared to other voters. They’re only about average or even a little below-average in how much they prioritize things like health care and jobs….”

You see this dynamic at work at the VPIRG rallies all the time: high school students propped up at the podium reading statements they clearly didn’t come up with on topics they clearly know nothing about calling for actions they clearly don’t understand the consequences of, always with stupid grins on their faces like trained seals who know a herring is about to be tossed their way. Useful idiots, to use Stalin’s term. Useful to “the cause” but to society not so much.

And so after graduation, no more herrings. Because the vast majority of the human race doesn’t want to pay someone to lecture them about trans issues, climate doom, or how we’re all racist, misogynistic, or homophobic the same way we are willing to pay someone to, say, fix our roof, build us a website, install a furnace, or [insert useful, beneficial, or entertaining thing here].

So, your typical Democratic Socialist has sadly been duped into tens of thousands of dollars worth of loan debt for a degree in Africana studies or some such thing, and if they’re lucky a job slinging lattes at Starbucks. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with working at Starbucks, it’s good, honest employment. You just don’t need to spend $70,000 a year for four years as a gender studies major to pursue that path. And if you did it’s safe to say you made a really, really big error in financial judgment as well as overall life planning. If you were steered into this by a Leftist teacher or community organizer you have every right to be pissed — at them, not the world.

What Silver’s article also discusses, although briefly, is who is most likely to be a Republican. And it’s billionaire oligarchs, of course! No, just kidding. Actually, well I’ll just quote the article….

Rather, it’s the precise opposite corner from the DSA: high-earners who didn’t attend college. About 60 percent of voters with a high school education or less, but whose households earned incomes of $60,000 or above, preferred Trump to the various Democratic presidential candidates. (You can probably think of various stereotypical professions here too: small business owners, independent contractors, real estate developers, used-car dealers, etc.)

In other words, if you’re someone who works hard and works smart to build something out of nothing and benefits your community by providing a necessary and practical good or service, you’re most likely to be a Republican.

All of which begs the question as we head into election season, which qualities do you want in the people running your government. Successful entrepreneurs who have used their own time and resources wisely and to good effect? Or a bunch of whiney, privileged, over-educated underachievers focused on “post material cultural issues” whatever the heck that means. I guess ask the people of New York City, Seattle, Chicago, California, or, closer to home, Burlington. The ones who haven’t already fled, that is.

Rob Roper is a freelance writer who has been involved with Vermont politics and policy for over 20 years. This article reprinted with permission from Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics, robertroper.substack.com