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“The median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb”

John Fea   |  September 22, 2021

Matthew Yglesias offers some advice to the Democrats:

Back in 1992, James Carville supposedly hung a sign in Clinton campaign headquarters that said, “it’s the economy, stupid.” By the same token, Democrats today could improve their performance enormously if every staffer’s computer monitor had a Post-It stuck to it that said “the median voter is a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college and lives in an unfashionable suburb.”

This is important because it’s true. But I think it tends not to be front of mind when decisions are getting made. That’s because decisions about how to frame issues are most often made by young college graduates who live in big cities and consume a lot of media created by other young college graduates who live in big cities. And while Republican staffers also inhabit a similar left-of-the-party-base bubble, the staff bias is constructive, pulling toward the median voter. For Democrats, it’s the opposite.

Most people in the country are white, and the population of voting-age citizens is whiter than the overall population, in part because Asian and Hispanic Americans participate in electoral politics at a lower rate than white and Black Americans.

White people predominate so heavily in the electorate that most Biden voters are white, as are an overwhelming share of Trump voters. 

Read the entire piece here.

Filed Under: Way of Improvement Tagged With: Democratic Party, politics, voters

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