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What’s the Deal with College Educated Women?
As every other group seems to be moving away from the outright catastrophe that is the Brandon Administrion, support for his party is conspicuously increasing among one demographic group.
Why is this demographic group so cultishly loyal to Democrats? Perhaps they are more susceptible to the left-wing social indoctrination of higher education. Perhaps they are over-represented in public employees (particularly public education) and are l0yal to the party of Government. It could also have a lot to do with class conformity and status seeking.
I am going to lay another acronym down, and I know these are confusing to some. The acronym is AWFL: Affluent White Female Liberal or Leftist. These are the women who treat wearing masks in public as a secular religion; the women who populate HOA boards; the women who watch The View; the women who shop at Whole Foods; the women who want the $200,000 loans they took out to pay for their Art History degrees canceled. They are strong, independent women who live in constant terror of being ostracized from their fellow AWFLs for failing to conform.
Highly paid political consultants tell their Republican clients that “suburban women” are the voters they need to target. Their turnout is high, relative to other demographic groups; and they love Government spending (yea!), they hate “divisive social issues” (“boo-hiss”), and they want to see politicians “work across the aisle,” or at least they that’s what they want, but then they vote in large numbers for radical, partisan Democrats.
I’m not a highly paid political consultant, but I don’t think there’s a good ROI (Return On Investment) in pursuing box-wine swilling suburban AWFLs who don’t vote based on policy, but based on their perception of their social status. I would advise Republicans to turn out higher numbers of other voters, in particular, working-class men of all ethnicities. A well-crafted message could probably get 8-9 of these men to the polls for the cost of persuading one box-wine swiller to change her vote; if she is willing to do so.
Republicans have shown a distinct distaste for working-class voters. Every time a Dispatch pundit sneers at “Populism,” Jonah is really sneering at those grubby, working-class voters who probably eat at Waffle House and have no idea the name of a good Barolo to pair with a truffle salad.
Published in General
Most of the smartest women I know don’t have college degrees, including Mrs. Guerra, who walked away from her degree ( grades were way better than mine) to raise our family.
That and the direct election of Senators and the income tax.
The discussion of religion is germane here. Higher education is inculcating a secular (although increasingly less secular) neopagan religion which is bidding to replace Christianity as Christianity replaced classical paganism. Success as a student in these secular seminaries depends in large part on scrupulous adherence to the theology, and in particular, on staying current with that theology’s increasing fundamentalism.
Enrollment in higher education is disproportionately female, and the trend is increasing. Prolonged enrollment correlates with greater adherence to Woke theology, which is highly evangelical. Wokism is the official religion of the Democrat Party and becomes the state religion wherever the Democrats have political control.
Why wouldn’t the (disproportionately female) adherents of that religion support the Party most aligned with their religious beliefs?
If “Western Civilization” kept women from voting and feeling empowered, our Prog masters would (and do) say “good riddance.”
Change the voter focus in this exchange to ‘black’ or ‘minority’ and we see the long-standing flaw of conservatives either ignoring or seeing these voting blocs as too monolithic to be worth the effort. Are we going to repeat this error with the AWFLs? Henry’s point is spot on – the message shouldn’t have to change but make an effort? Yes.
Recall this:
1. I don’t think there’s any difference in the women’s 2018 and 2022 data. Two and four point “changes” are likely within sampling error.
2. If these data are true, then the much-predicted GOP tsunami is not gonna happen. Assuming equal numbers of college-educated and non-college-educated men and women, and that equal numbers of men and women vote, the overall tally there is Dem +9.
What Would Julia Do?
Here’s a workable starting point.
Haven’t gone through comments yet. I will, but later.
Post-Baccalaureate women have likely committed to career over family, even if only subconsciously. They already know that the one man who will never leave them is Uncle Sam.
This may be the demographic that is hardest to reach. In my experience it is the college educated, single with no kids that are completely wedded to the democrat-socialist lie. They have a faux spirit of generosity because they support large government programs. Of course all the taxpayers pick up the tab.
Was there supposed to be a link?…didn’t see one.
Democrats basically assert that highly-educated (or at least highly-credentialed) people should be assigned high status and deferred to for that status, like a traditional nobility. (Part of the reason for the hostility toward Trump was that he did not so defer) So people with degrees and high status anxiety will tend to be drawn to the Democrats.
It’s also partly the effect of who gets chosen. I work in a lot of different fields, and I am always amused at the similarity in personality of the people who make up a particular professional field. It is something I’ve found interesting over the years. Knowing that the modern SAT is a step-child of personality tests (the IQ test part of it came out of the assessment for G, which was a measure of motivation), I’ve further wondered if the SATs didn’t inadvertently sort out the student population not by academic potential but by personality. :-) (So goes the law of unintended consequences. It would be really funny if I’m right about this, that they missed measuring academic potential and instead got some sort of uniform personality. :-) )
At any rate, who does well on standardized testing determines who gets chosen for college interviews and who gets chosen ultimately for admission. Thus the professional fields strengthen and perpetuate themselves. And it goes on and on, throughout the postgraduate job market. The interviewers like people like themselves in personality. It is self-reinforcing all the way up the chain.
It’s the opposite of creating a diverse student body and later a diverse professional body of thought. To me, it explains how, for example, the pediatric psychiatry field has gone so far down the transgender rabbit hole and also the dopamine-affecting psychiatric medicines for little kids (long story). There’s no argument within the field. It doesn’t exist and it’s not allowed anyway. It’s a uniform body of belief and practice.
Sending some women to college is like a person on depressants drinking alcohol…overdose.
Women are created to care and nurture. They seek security. Democrats play to that need. Women used to have that need filled by assuming traditional roles in the home. Having escaped into the working world, they are satisfying that need in their new family, the Dem Party.
I, too, have had fun dismissing suffrage as an overall liability to my good life because of the number of women who vote against my wishes. At least 40% of us aren’t suckered by the Democrats.
Finally, some of my fellow women are stupid and emotionally immature. They create more drama in the workplace than men, usually. With the feminization of men, they are developing their own drama creds, too.
I am wondering about the women who were polled too. Every study I’ve seen in the past has concluded that women small business owners vote Republican. Also a lot of mothers do, which makes sense since it’s mothers who get an accurate understanding of how to move people from dependence to independence and who understand the importance of independence to lifelong well-being. :-)
Mostly of my co-workers are millennials and college educated. I definitely see an increase in drama from both sexes in this category. It is part of the reason for the woke struggle sessions lead by HR. Most of my fellow Gen-Xers roll our eyes at these, but the kids take them to heart and Management tolerates them. I have a seething resentment for this because it feels like I am back in High School.
Perhaps related: Bad Eagle’s Question
This Ricochet post answers a lot.
https://ricochet.com/1215003/freedoms-bane/#respond
Here’s my own personal theory: Women are more likely than men to turn personal virtues — virtues like compassion, virtues best exercised in intimate relationships — into political ideals. In other words, women often treat the political sphere like the home, and they treat political constituencies like children in need of nurturing. Instead of seeing the political arena as a place where strangers resolve practical disputes, they expect politics to solve interpersonal problems, attend to human needs, or foster a sense of identity. This is why radical feminism looks so weirdly “domestic” — because it is. Just take a look at the arguments for abolishing the family.
Because so many women are ideologically unmoored from religion and traditional society, and because we live in such an atomized world, the impulse runs wild, with no limiting principle.
Yet the same ‘progressives’ who want to think of government as being like a family are very often also those who want to turn all personal relationships into something political and rule-governed…’the personal is political’. The objective seems to be to turn Gemeinschaften into Gesellschaften, and to turn Gesellschaften into Gemeinschaften.
This survey is from a couple of years ago, but has a lot more detail than the MSNBC piece.
So you don’t favor lowering the voting age to 16, I take it.
The bigger question is by what criteria should anyone be allowed to vote?
Should people be allowed more than one vote depending on how invested they are? Maybe men should get a second vote if they hold a job. And a third vote if they own property.
And another vote if they’re over 65?
There are lots of rational potential categories for additional votes. Number of children. Business owners. No net indebtedness. (I won’t mention number of wives.)
Talk about creating an incentive to have kids.
Who’s their god? Woki?
Interesting. Maybe IQ tests themselves test more for personality. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
Is there any other psychological test that has a dinner society celebrating those who scored the highest on it? :)
Yes, in the same sense that the promise of access to handicapped parking gives one an incentive to, say, shoot oneself in the foot.
If so, it isn’t the preferred personality of most of the world.
That’s a little extreme. You could, say, get a fake doctor’s note, which is easier, less painful, and less disabling.
Maybe we could create a tax structure that incentivizes having children. No, that would only work on people who pay taxes.
Maybe the parents get the kids’ votes until the kids are old enough to take it on themselves.