The DSA sweet spot: highly educated, downwardly mobile

A 2017 DSA protest in New York. Alice Bacon / DSA.

Now that the World Cup is over, we’re fully focused on getting the midterm forecast up and running as soon as possible. I’m going to be honest that between publishing a ton of stories over the past two months, highly competitive primaries, redistricting, and various other distractions, this has taken a little longer than we were hoping for. So we’re going to err on the side of publishing less for the next couple of weeks until the model is ready to go.

However, one benefit of working on the model is that there are usually some fun spin-offs from the various data that we collect for it. For instance, in calculating the state-by-state correlations used by the model, we rely on voter-level microdata from the Cooperative Election Study, a large-sample online survey conducted every year or two. We’ve aggregated responses to the CES in each year it was conducted during the “Trump Era” — from 2016 through last year — into a dataset of more than 400,000 voters.

That gives us high-fidelity data for capturing voting trends among smaller subgroups that usually get lost in the shuffle. Today I’m going to focus on one such group: voters with high educational attainment but low to middle incomes. Because income and education are positively correlated, there aren’t all that many of these voters. I’d argue, though, that they’re vital to understanding emerging trends within Democratic politics, and particularly the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).Subscribe now

The DSA occupies the high-education, lower-income corner of the electorate

As a result of contentious Democratic primaries in Michigan, Maine, and New York, I’ve been reading a lot of conversation about the role that class plays in voting patterns in the United States. In these primaries, candidates like Graham Platner and Abdul El-Sayed who are associated with democratic socialism often claim to have the mandate of the working class. But in practice…