08-30-2018, 08:36 PM
(08-30-2018, 11:45 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: A pattern may be emerging. White people with less than a college education are not especially prone to supporting reactionary politics -- if they are not Christian Protestant fundamentalists or evangelicals.
Quote:Mike Podhorzer, AFL-CIO’s political director, suggests that if we want to have a better understanding of white, non-college educated voters, we need to stop lumping them into one, catch-all category. What really distinguishes a Trump-supporting white voter from one who doesn’t isn’t education or even gender, it's whether or not that voter is evangelical.
Using a data set from Public Religion Research Institute, Podhorzer broke out white voters by gender, education and whether they identified as evangelical. The gap between white voters who approve and disapprove of Trump by gender was 25 points. By education (college versus non-college) it was about the same at 26 percent. But the gap in perceptions of the president between white voters who are evangelical and those who aren’t was a whopping 60 percent!
This evangelical support gap transcends education and gender. For example, among white evangelicals, college-educated men and non-college educated men give Trump equally impressive job approval ratings (78 percent and 80 percent respectively). But, among white men who aren’t evangelical, the education gap is significant. Those without a college degree give Trump a 52 percent job approval rating, while just 40 percent of those with a college degree approve of the job he’s doing.
Meanwhile, among women, if you remove evangelicals, white women with and without a college degree have the same (very low) opinion of the president.
White evangelical women without a college degree give Trump a 68 percent job approval rating, while those with a degree give him a much lower, though still positive 51 percent approval rating. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval among white, non-evangelical women without a college degree is 35 percent, just five points higher than the 30 percent approval rating he gets from white, non-evangelical college-educated women.
Podhorzer’s analysis leads to two conclusions. First, stop assuming that all white, non-college voters are core Trump supporters. Trump’s base is evangelical white voters, regardless of education level. Second, white non-evangelical, non-college women are the ultimate swing voters.
https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/n...ite-voters
...I am guessing that the distinction in the polls between white voters with college degrees and white voters without college degrees is that Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians are much less likely to attain college degrees. Fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity have strong currents of anti-intellectualism that secularism, mainline Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism do not have. Biblical literalism to the extent of promoting young-earth creationism is strongly anti-intellectual, and anti-intellectualism is not good for surviving four years of college without dropping out.
This data would also seem to support those of us on the new "commandments" thread who say that evangelicals are predominantly narrow-minded, prejudiced and/or stereotypically dogmatic and conservative.
This is still not true for all evangelicals, although it is much more true today than 50 or 100 years ago. You might not have guessed, for example, that ultra-liberal George McGovern, the idol of young hippie anti-war rebels like me in 1972, was evangelical.