The less you know, the more you like Kerry.
(And, hey, it's a LIBERAL mag saying this!)
JOHN KERRY IS RIGHT TO BE SCARED: The Wisconsin exit polls are turning up what looks like a paradox: Despite John Kerry's aloof-liberal-Brahmin rap, and despite John Edwards's heavy "son-of-a-mill-worker" shtick, Kerry did better last night among less educated, less affluent, blue-collar, and rural voters than he did among more educated, more affluent, white-collar, suburban voters, while the opposite was true for Edwards.
Consider some of the numbers. Kerry led Edwards by large margins among people who make under $15,000 per year and under $30,000 per year (rolling up 28- and 13-point leads against Edwards in these categories, respectively). This much you'd expect, since poor voters tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. The interesting thing is that Kerry opened up a 5-point lead among voters making between $30,000 and $50,000 per year--a category you'd probably think of as mostly blue-collar voters--while only beating Edwards by one point in the $50,000-$75,000 category, and actually losing to Edwards (and by 7 points!) in the $75,000-$100,000 category. And Edwards and Kerry were tied among voters making over $100,000. Other than the result among the poor, this is the exact opposite of what the conventional wisdom would predict, which is that Edwards does better among downscale-but-not-poor voters (who tend to be more culturally conservative), and Kerry does better among upscale voters (who tend to be more culturally liberal).
And it's not just an anomaly of the income data. You get pretty much the same result in just about every category that correlates with blue-collar-ness and white-collar-ness. Kerry led Edwards by 13 points among those with only a high school diploma, but the two candidates were tied among those with a college degree, and Edwards led Kerry by 4 points among those with some post-graduate training. Ditto union membership: Kerry beat Edwards by 8 points among households with a union member. He beat Edwards by only 3 points in households without a union member. What about the urban/suburban/rural divide? Same story. Kerry, as expected, carried big cities (with their large concentrations of poor people) by a whopping margin (some 21 points). But Kerry also won by a surprising 11 points in rural areas, and by a seven-point margin in small towns--both places more likely to be culturally conservative. Edwards, by contrast, won in relatively affluent enclaves, like suburbs, which he carried by four points.
What on earth is going on here? Why is Kerry winning over poor liberals (one group everyone thought he'd win) but not affluent liberals (another group everyone thought he'd win)? And why is he doing so well among blue-collar voters (a group everyone thought he'd have trouble winning over), while John Edwards struggles among that demographic (who are supposed to be most naturally inclined toward him), but does amazingly well among white-collar voters?
One possibility is that the Republicans who crossed over and voted in the Wisconsin primary are distorting the results. We know that Edwards did very well among Republicans last night (winning them 44-18), and we also know that Republicans tend to be relatively affluent. It's possible that all those affluent liberals I'm assuming supported John Edwards were actually Republicans in disguise. But I doubt it. Republicans made up only nine percent of yesterday's vote, while people making above $75,000 accounted for about 25 percent of the vote, and people making above $50,000 accounted for about 50 percent of the vote. It doesn't seem like Republicans could account for a large enough fraction of these categories to drive the trend we're seeing.
My own hunch is that what we're seeing is an important divide between less sophisticated voters and more sophisticated voters. Just about the only thing less sophisticated voters--who, I'm guessing, tend to be poorer and less well-educated--know about John Kerry is that he's been winning, and possibly that he's a longtime Senator and a Vietnam veteran. On the other hand, more sophisticated voters--who, I'm guessing, tend to be more affluent and better educated--have probably paid attention to the campaign long enough to know that, in addition to these things, Kerry's from Massachusetts (not exactly a presidential breeding ground of late), tilts to the liberal end of the ideological spectrum, and tends to be kind of boring and long-winded. Which is to say, less affluent, less educated voters are looking at John Kerry's string of primary victories and concluding from them that he's electable. More affluent, better educated voters are actually watching debates and reading newspapers. And they're concluding from these things that Edwards--who is neither from Massachusetts nor a liberal nor boring--is actually more electable. (Particularly after many of these newspapers endorse Edwards, as the two biggest papers in Wisconsin recently did.)
It's a phenomenon that's actually very similar to what goes on in the stock market. Less sophisticated investors just pick the stocks whose prices they've heard are going up. More sophisticated investors actually do some research about the companies they plan to invest in. Up until yesterday, Kerry was that tech stock that the girlfriend of the cousin of the guy down the street said was a can't-miss opportunity, while Edwards was the unheralded stock of a company with a little-known but solid product.
Judging from the way Kerry timed his victory speech last night to bump Edwards off the air mid-sentence, it sounds to me like he's getting scared. And he should be. John Kerry is riding a bubble, and bubbles have a nasty habit of popping.
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