Let's Hope The Democrats Buy This Argument--Updated
They'll be in the
wilderness for decades.
I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million—my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.)
As I never tire of pointing out, Democrats are capable of holding two quite contradictory thoughts in their head at the same time: that they are the party of the working class, and that they are smarter than average. In fact, if we take education level as a substitute for intelligence, it quickly becomes obvious that the Republicans are smarter. They consistently get a higher percentage of the votes of college-educated people than they do of high school graduates, and they consistently get a higher percentage fo the votes of high school graduates than they do of high school dropouts. It is true that this turns around when you get to folks with advanced degrees, but this is because a large percentage of those with advanced degrees are teachers and lawyers, two groups who dominate the Democratic party.
Update: Here are the breakdowns by education level
per Gallup for this election. The first number is the percentage of all voters with that education level, the second is President Bush's percentage of that vote, the third is Kerry's percentage, and the last is Bush's relative advantage in that group.
Postgraduate education 20 47 53 -6
College graduate (no postgrad) 15 58 42 +16
Some college 33 56 44 +12
High school or less education 32 46 54 -8
As you can see, the trend discussed above continued in 2004. Bush got 58% of the college graduate vote, 56% of the "some" college group, and 46% of the no college group. Unfortunately, Gallup seems to have eliminated the high school dropout demographic, but I can assure you it went overwhelmingly for Kerry.
