from the WSJ Opinion Journal
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Why did the San Francisco Bay Area vote against recalling Gov. Gray Davis, while virtually the entire rest of the state went the other way? The San Francisco Chronicle poses the question, and Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, offered this answer: "It strikes me that the better educated people are, more often than not, they tend to be more liberal, and I think this is a very well-educated area."
It's easy to dismiss this as mere ideological prejudice, which it no doubt is. But Schell's statement that better-educated people tend to be more liberal is subject to empirical testing. Here are the findings of the Edison Media Research California exit poll on the recall, broken down by education level (the second column shows the percentage of the total sample that each subgroup makes up):
% Yes No
Did not complete high school 3% -- --
High school grad 13% 61% 39%
Some college/associate degree 32% 59% 41%
College grad 28% 57% 43%
Postgraduate study 23% 45% 55%
And here are the findings for the vote on Davis's replacement (CB is Democrat Cruz Bustamante; AS is Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger; TM is Republican Tom McClintock; PC is Green Peter Camejo):
% CB AS TM PC
Did not complete high school 3% -- -- -- --
High school grad 13% 33% 50% 12% 2%
Some college/associate degree 33% 30% 48% 14% 4%
College grad 28% 32% 49% 13% 3%
Postgraduate study 23% 44% 38% 10% 5%
Looking at these figures, we see small differences among high school and college grads, among whom more education seems to correlate slightly with less support for the recall; 62% of each of the three groups voted Republican and 34% or 35% either Democrat or Green. The real outliers are those who've done postgraduate study, who actually opposed the recall and a plurality of whom (49%) voted Democrat or Green (vs. 48% GOP).
There appears to be another outlying group, too: high school dropouts. Because they made up such a small part of the sample, the pollsters were not able to generate definitive numbers. They do, however, give combined percentages for those whose education level is "high school or less": 58% to 42% in favor of the recall, 58% Republican, 38% Democrat or Green.
Based on these numbers, we've derived the following figures for high school dropouts: Against the recall, 55% to 45% (the same proportions as postgrads), and on the replacement ballot 51% Democrat or Green, 41% Republican. Take these numbers with a grain of salt; they aren't statistically reliable. But they are suggestive.
The Democratic "base," it seems, can be found at the extreme edges of the bell curve, consisting of a small number of uneducated voters and a large number of overeducated ones. The educated elite, as we suggested last week, clearly dominates the party. One lesson of the California election, though, is that it's possible to be highly intelligent and educated without being all that smart. If you add together all the Orville Schell types in the California Democratic Party, we bet they have a collective IQ of over a million. But the best idea they could come up with is to tell people to vote for Gray Davis?
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Overeducated socialist yahoos for Davis?
You'd think that people who have allegedly gotten as much practice thinking as some college professors have would be able to sit down and calculate at least a couple second order effects of their ideas. Or maybe that's my problem: I'm thinking again....
__________________________________________________
Why did the San Francisco Bay Area vote against recalling Gov. Gray Davis, while virtually the entire rest of the state went the other way? The San Francisco Chronicle poses the question, and Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, offered this answer: "It strikes me that the better educated people are, more often than not, they tend to be more liberal, and I think this is a very well-educated area."
It's easy to dismiss this as mere ideological prejudice, which it no doubt is. But Schell's statement that better-educated people tend to be more liberal is subject to empirical testing. Here are the findings of the Edison Media Research California exit poll on the recall, broken down by education level (the second column shows the percentage of the total sample that each subgroup makes up):
% Yes No
Did not complete high school 3% -- --
High school grad 13% 61% 39%
Some college/associate degree 32% 59% 41%
College grad 28% 57% 43%
Postgraduate study 23% 45% 55%
And here are the findings for the vote on Davis's replacement (CB is Democrat Cruz Bustamante; AS is Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger; TM is Republican Tom McClintock; PC is Green Peter Camejo):
% CB AS TM PC
Did not complete high school 3% -- -- -- --
High school grad 13% 33% 50% 12% 2%
Some college/associate degree 33% 30% 48% 14% 4%
College grad 28% 32% 49% 13% 3%
Postgraduate study 23% 44% 38% 10% 5%
Looking at these figures, we see small differences among high school and college grads, among whom more education seems to correlate slightly with less support for the recall; 62% of each of the three groups voted Republican and 34% or 35% either Democrat or Green. The real outliers are those who've done postgraduate study, who actually opposed the recall and a plurality of whom (49%) voted Democrat or Green (vs. 48% GOP).
There appears to be another outlying group, too: high school dropouts. Because they made up such a small part of the sample, the pollsters were not able to generate definitive numbers. They do, however, give combined percentages for those whose education level is "high school or less": 58% to 42% in favor of the recall, 58% Republican, 38% Democrat or Green.
Based on these numbers, we've derived the following figures for high school dropouts: Against the recall, 55% to 45% (the same proportions as postgrads), and on the replacement ballot 51% Democrat or Green, 41% Republican. Take these numbers with a grain of salt; they aren't statistically reliable. But they are suggestive.
The Democratic "base," it seems, can be found at the extreme edges of the bell curve, consisting of a small number of uneducated voters and a large number of overeducated ones. The educated elite, as we suggested last week, clearly dominates the party. One lesson of the California election, though, is that it's possible to be highly intelligent and educated without being all that smart. If you add together all the Orville Schell types in the California Democratic Party, we bet they have a collective IQ of over a million. But the best idea they could come up with is to tell people to vote for Gray Davis?
__________________________________________
Overeducated socialist yahoos for Davis?
You'd think that people who have allegedly gotten as much practice thinking as some college professors have would be able to sit down and calculate at least a couple second order effects of their ideas. Or maybe that's my problem: I'm thinking again....
