Does “Education Lead to the Left”? Recent Study Says Yes
Monday, 3 November 2008 Clay Burell 
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Interesting post on “secular parenting” writer Dale McGowan’s The Meming of Life:
….If it’s true that education leads to the left, fear-based campaigning should increase in effectiveness as education levels decrease, and you’d expect states with the lowest per-capita educational attainment to favor the fear-mongering candidate.
The list below ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia in order by proportion of college degrees in the population (highest to lowest). Those in blue are favoring Obama (as of Nov. 1). Those in red favor McCain. Black indicates a current toss-up:
TOP THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (15 blue, 2 red)
District of Columbia
Massachusetts
Maryland
Colorado
Virginia
New Hampshire
Connecticut
New Jersey
Minnesota
Vermont
Kansas
California
New York
Washington
Utah
Delaware
Illinois[click here for the rest of the list]
The colors change remarkably as the list continues down the educational ladder, and McGowan concludes with interesting info on the conviction levels (“I’m sure my choice is best”) of voters across the states. Seems the “intellectual arrogance” accusation so often tossed at the “educated elites” from those who seem to prefer a Joe the Plumber in the Oval Office is actually a quality that is common among the “elite-bashers” themselves.
See the full article here, and draw your own conclusions.
[Last paragraph revised for clarity.]
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- Beyond: TIME: US Report Calls for "Radical Change" in K-12 US Education
- Social Networks as a Political Force for Education (and, More Students 2.0 Sought)
- The Most Important Edu Website I Know: Education for Well-Being Strikes Again
- Guest-Blogger Bill Farren: Education for Well-Being
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Tags: elections08 Print This Post
No. 1 — November 3rd, 2008 at 10:08 pm
So…Confidence in one’s conclusions automatically constitutes “intellectual arrogance”? Really? The only honest position is in the uncertain middle? That’s a strange and unsupported leap.
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Clay Burell Reply:
November 4th, 2008 at 3:41 am
Hi Francis,
The scare-quotes around the phrase was meant to suggest irony over an accusation that is often thrown at the educated classes.
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No. 2 — November 3rd, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Regardless of what conclusions someone might draw… that data set is certainly interesting all in bold red & blue like that. Wow.
Sean Nashs last blog post..Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you get so smart?
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Clay Burell Reply:
November 4th, 2008 at 3:44 am
Funny, Sean – I understand your comment about as much as Francis understood my scare quotes.
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No. 3 — November 4th, 2008 at 2:42 am
That certainly is an interesting dataset, but doesn’t come as a surprise.
I think you’re dead wrong about the “intellectual arrogance” part – conviction doesn’t mean you haven’t thought clearly about something. Indeed, a lack of arrogance will often lead to greater conviction.
To say it is arrogant to strongly support a candidate is to say it is cowardly to look at a plate for crap and say you don’t want to eat it.
Also, I’m not sure where the data you get for this conviction is from. The only thing the data included was percentage of population: “then it comes to strength of support in each state — the percent of the population by which the candidate is favored — the correlation is even clearer.”
If many people support a candidate it does not mean that people in that state generally support that candidate with greater conviction. An entire state could support Obama because they don’t like old people, but that doesn’t give them much conviction. A better measure of conviction would be percentage of population volunteering for a candidate. (Let’s watch Vermont climb even higher!)
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Clay Burell Reply:
November 4th, 2008 at 3:45 am
See my reply to Francis about the use of scare quotes around the phrase.
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No. 4 — November 4th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
[...] bombings this week in Iraq show how fragile that peace is. [↩]For more on this angle, see yesterday’s post on the correlation of successful fear-mongering campaigns to voters’ educational levels [...]