Saturday 19 November 2016

education levels and voting trump

It does seem that education levels and voting habits are linked:
Jay Doubleyou: brexit, trump and dumbing down

Just take a look at this map:

high-school-graduation-rates-map.png (1200×970)
Sleep in the Bed You Made: Donald Trump is the Logical Result of the GOP's 40-Year Racial Strategy :: Politics :: Features :: donald trump :: Paste

There's quite a difference between white college educated Republican voters and those who didn't go to college:

The GOP's college, non-college divide | Pew Research Center

Confederate flag – Pop South
Modern display of the Confederate flag - Wikipedia

It's a question of race:

Poor white Americans know the only thing they have going for them is their whiteness. If they vote for horrible, racist politicians that tell them that racial equality will be done away with, then they won’t have as much competition for the crumbs tossed to the masses by the rich. I never, ever considered that. Do you agree?

Why it seems that poor whites continue to vote against their interests

Late in his life, Dr. Martin Luther King began to shift the focus of his work beyond race toward poverty. King held out the charitable belief that elevating the awareness of lower income whites to their condition might offer a pathway to a post-racial coalition among America’s lower-earners. He described his insights in a 1968 sermon, centered on his conversations with police while he was jailed in Birmingham. Here’s a digest of his comments on that interaction:

“And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, “Now, you know what? You ought to be marching with us. You’re just as poor as Negroes.” And I said, “You are put in the position of supporting your oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people. And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are white.”

As he was wont to do, King spread a Hallmark-card sheen on that interaction, but his jailers did not set him free. They did not join hands with him. They did not march by his side then or at any time after.

Sympathy for the (blue-eyed) devil | GOPLifer

And there's the question of poverty:
What does it say that most of the 10 poorest states are Republican? – Cafferty File - CNN.com Blogs

And there's the question of keeping money out of education:

Keeping Their Voters Stupid Keeps Republicans Elected

By Rmuse on Sat, Aug 30th, 2014

Jefferson was not the first man to identify the death knell of democracy, or “self-government,” was an uneducated populace. Republicans understand they could hardly garner any electoral support if the population was educated and informed, so they have went to extraordinary and, often, unconstitutional lengths to keep the populace ignorant by cutting education funding. Whether it is transferring public school funding to private, religious, or underperforming charter schools, or just slashing education funding, Republicans will employ any measure to keep Americans stupid so they will vote against their own self-interests.

On Thursday, another judge ruled that Republicans in Texas used an unconstitutional scam to starve public schools and produce another generation of ignorant Texans to vote for Republicans. The Texas ruling was a repudiation of gubernatorial candidate Gregg Abbot’s defense of slashing well over $5 billion from public schools using an unconstitutional property tax scam. However, the means of slashing public education funding is unimportant, but it is a growing trend among Republican-led states whose goal is simply to maintain a base of support among uneducated voters.