What did the country ever do to white college graduates to make them feel so disaffected from its economic and political system? The wave of socialist victories in Democratic primaries is being driven by well-educated white voters who are more extreme than the rest of the Democratic coalition.
The latest evidence is a new poll in the closely watched Democratic primary for a Senate seat in Michigan. The AOC-endorsed, Israel-hating insurgent, Abdul El-Sayed, has had momentum, but is now narrowly trailing the establishment candidate, Haley Stevens. According to a Detroit News survey, Stevens is ahead by about seven points, with demographic advantages that are very telling.
Stevens, a goofy white lady, leads El-Sayed by a 3-to-1 margin among black voters. On the other hand, El-Sayed, a person of color fully vested in the left’s Third Worldist agenda, leads among white voters, 51-39%. Stevens, a career apparatchik and politician, leads among non-college-educated voters, 56-34%, whereas El-Sayed, who has been endorsed by the Working Families Party, is ahead with college-educated voters, 48-41.
The respective strengths of the two candidates run against the grain of what you might expect in a race between a conventional Democrat and a radical, yet accord with what we’ve seen in campaign after campaign.
Socialists may imagine themselves the champions of people of color and of workers, but their movement is, by and large, most attractive to caucasian associate professors of sociology who think they haven’t achieved the station in life that they deserve.
It’s less a proletarian phenomenon than a project of frustrated Ph.D. candidates and medium-level professionals. Because many socialist candidates have immigrant backgrounds, it can be tempting to consider the movement as fundamentally a function of immigration, when that’s not true.
A 2021 survey of DSA members found that they were disproportionately white, at 85%, and disproportionately had college degrees (80%) or a higher degree (35%). This leaves them in a similar predicament to pioneering communists and socialists in Europe who talked up the prospect of a worker revolution, and then looked around the room and saw no workers, only intellectuals and activists like themselves.
The good news for DSA-aligned candidates is that college-educated white people are very reliable voters who can make a big difference in the kind of low-turnout primaries where anti-establishment, left-wing candidates thrive. A recent analysis in The New York Times noted that Zohran Mamdani-endorsed socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat in a marquee New York City congressional primary while winning high-education and higher-income areas; Espaillat, in contrast, won in majority-Hispanic and lower-income areas.
Another Mamdani pick, Brad Lander similarly wiped up in high-income and high-education areas while crushing Rep. Dan Goldman, whose strong performance in low-income parts of the district didn’t save him. Socialistic economics may have appeal to working-class voters in theory, but the DSA couples its economics with extreme views on cultural issues that have very little appeal with non-college-educated voters. Tax the rich? Sure. Transcend the gender binary? No, thanks — whatever that means.
That the average black Democrat is more moderate and pragmatic than the average white Democrat may prove the ultimate check on whether an AOC-type candidate can claim the big prize of the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. It’s one thing to appeal to the so-called Commie Belt in New York City, the young, highly educated, diverse neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn that so strongly backed Zohran Mamdani; it’s quite another to win over the older, religious African American voters in, say, South Carolina’s I-95 Black Belt.
In the 2020 primaries, Bernie Sanders ran a campaign of great verve and ideological energy, while Joe Biden stumbled from one early setback to another — yet, black Democrats decided that the former vice president was the safer choice, and that was the end of Sanders. In short, the workers of the world may one day unite, but not behind a socialist vessel for the grievances of ideologically exotic, college-educated white people.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.