Neither of the current major party candidates is the "Grey Champion".

[pbrower2a]

(09-03-2016, 07:33 AM)Einzige Wrote: That's the result of a confusion of terms on my part. I was thinking of the Wide Awakes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Awakes

Four hundred thousand young men joined up as Lincoln partisan Wide Awakes throughout the North in 1860.

Incidentally, your point about college-educated youths supporting Hoover over FDR doesn't demonstrate anything more than the fact that the college educated have always historically supported the GOP, even against Obama in 2008:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trum...graduates/



Historically this was, probably, a function of income. All it shows is that collegiate youth in 1932 were of a kind with the self-selecting rich Republicans who convinced Reader's Digest that Landon would win in a walk four years later. There's no question that Roosevelt had the overwhelming backing of poor and working-class youths - that is to say, the vast majority of them. And it was this group that turned him into the Grey Champion.

Income has become less closely connected to a Republican lean in voting. People with above-average incomes can now have good cause to not vote for the Right -- like having a well-paying job, professional practice, or even a lucrative business that depends upon the government. Note also that many people not WASP males (women and 'ethnics') and not of 'upper-crust' origin have gotten college educations beginning with the GI Bill after World War II. College attendance used to be strongly connected to class privilege before attending college; that is over.

Something else: college education has some effects on the way people think. College culls out people who could never graduate -- scatterbrains and people with primitive thought. It demands that people show some logical processes and intellectual discretion. Could it be that college makes people less vulnerable to demagogues? Democrats may have been more likely to make demagogic appeals or appeal to such fears as nuclear war, the end of Social Security, abolition of the minimum wage, etc. .... and programs like Social Security and Medicare can look demagogic at first. Note also that Democrats used to get far more votes in the least well-educated part of America -- the South.

Donald Trump is a demagogue, something extremely uncharacteristic for a Republican. He appeals heavily to ignoramuses.