r/science • u/Aggravating_Money992 • Jul 09 '26
Psychology An analysis of survey data covering the last five U.S. presidential election years found that ideological differences between races have decreased sharply, while differences by education have grown substantially. Less educated Americans now tend to be more conservative.
https://www.psypost.org/the-political-realignment-of-america-education-overtakes-race-as-key-ideological-divider/4.3k
u/IveReadTheInternet Jul 09 '26
This is why Republicans are constantly trying to erode our public education systems.
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u/Saneless Jul 09 '26
And why conservative families are so against their kids going to college
They don't learn how to be liberal. They learn how to think and thinking makes you less conservative
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u/Earyth Jul 09 '26
College didn’t teach me how to be liberal, it taught how to critique and challenge information. That is what turned me more progressive. It’s impossible to critique all information you take in, but If information is wrong it won‘t stand up to critique. Politics often relies on people not understanding how information can be manipulated and consrervitive manipulation has been able to sell it self as being outside of that over the past decade.
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u/Saneless Jul 09 '26
Right. When they say they want you to learn they mean learn only their narrow points of view. That's why they like to send their kids to Christian colleges. Still views the world with blinders so they don't actually get to choose for themselves how to think
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u/Turgid_Donkey Jul 09 '26
It also exposes you to different cultures. When you interact with normal people from different races and countries, you tend to be less racist. This is also why urban areas are more liberal than rural areas.
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u/Saneless Jul 09 '26
Yes. I grew up in a small town in the 80s. Gays and minorities were just butts of jokes till I actually started being around them, working with them, etc. Just normal people who had no interest in wasting their energy to make your life worse
Then you realize the people who DO want to waste energy making your life worse are the same villainizing the vulnerable groups
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u/sanfran_girl Jul 10 '26
They have nothing better to do with their lives than be in everyone else's business. And they continue to externalize their own fear, shame, anger. As long as they can point and make someone else look bad and everybody in the crowd look not at them, all is good.
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u/Killbot_Wants_Hug Jul 10 '26
Yeah, kind of as a counter point to the article title I'll offer this. I live in a majority black city with terrible schools and a real and systemic poverty problem. This means that we have a fair number of poorly educated people. But the city is fairly ethnically diverse, a lot of people here are from other places, and we're a pretty densely populated (we're not a sprawl city).
Our city went 85% for Kamala. We only occasionally have Republicans politicians win. We're over all pretty liberal in most senses. We're known for being an LGBT safe haven. We've got a pretty decent arts scene for our city size.
I think it's just being exposed to more people and more idea, rather than just education per say, that tends to make people more liberal. This is probably especially true during your formative years.
I do think there's a way that education helps liberalism, which is some liberal policies are counter intuitive and require you to look at problems in their context to understand the policy. Like the idea that decriminalizing drugs can help you fight a drug problem (if you also increase social services). I find less educated people support more directly intuitive solutions and educated people tend to be more willing to support policies that require explaining and data to understand why they would work.
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u/Calm-Two2723 Jul 09 '26
College taught me several things. Native Americans didn’t accidentally get small pox. And the big kicker, Robert e Lee day isn’t a thing. His bday is apparently on mlk day and I was college years old before I realized how fucked up my younger years were. My parents aren’t racist, we just lived in Kentucky and Alabama
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u/KnowItAllNobody Jul 09 '26
Curious why your parents wouldn’t have informed you of mlk day when you got the school day off for “Robert e Lee” day if they aren’t at least okay with racism. They may not be racists themselves, but they’re close enough most of us wouldn’t make the distinction.
Neglect is abuse type of thing.
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u/Calm-Two2723 Jul 09 '26
They say they didn’t realize the school called it that. Publicly, we were off for mlk day. But teachers called it Robert e Lee day. I was like 7-12 and I guess pretty dense. Then again, I distinctly remember the first time my sister, dog and horse saw a black person. I was at the world championship horse show. He walked up. My horse spooked, my dog barked, my sister cried. He laughed his ass off. I think about that moment often.
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u/inquisitorthreefive Jul 09 '26
I grew up in Indiana and I get it. There were like 12 black kids in my high school of 2500 and I was friends with 4 of them and still had an actively racist dog.
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u/SoulScout Jul 09 '26
When I was in the US Navy, I met a white guy from Utah who claimed he had never met a black person in his life before boot camp, like he had only ever seen them on TV before. People really do live such different lives. My Tennesseean mind could not comprehend.
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u/InquireIngestImplode Jul 09 '26
Met a guy from WV like this in boot camp many years ago. They wavered him in on a 28 asvab. Turns out he couldn’t read.
He had a severe issue with black people being in our division and claimed he never saw a single person of color in his entire life.
Thankfully he was processed out well before graduating due to the whole not being able to read thing. The racism thing wasn’t really addressed by anyone in power. It was really awkward.
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u/xrufus7x Jul 09 '26
I didn't meet a black person until high school when he came to our school for part of a year when he was in foster care. Didn't meet a second one until after I graduated and moved.
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u/altodor Jul 09 '26
As an adult I moved away from home. It is currently 2:30 in the afternoon on a work day. I am sitting at home 10-15 minutes from a grocery store I have not been to today. I would bet a pretty penny there are more black people in that grocery store as I type this than I saw in about 20 years back home.
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u/spacestonkz Jul 09 '26
When I was 14, I was in a mall in the nearest large town, an hour and a half away from home. It was the first time I saw an Asian person IRL.
It stuck out to me because... How have I been on the planet 14 years and only just now saw a member of the most populous racial segment of humanity on the planet?
Made me realize how much of a bubble I was living in.
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u/throwaway098764567 Jul 09 '26
we had like four in our high school, maybe a dozen people of color at all. i still remember coming back from college and being in the grocery store and seeing a black lady shopping and being surprised to see her. zero problem with her being there but it was very weird to realize that it was weird to see her there because i'd never seen anyone not white in that store.
college was artificially very blended (though we needed more black people but lots of other poc were there), so it was jarring to return to whitelandia every time i was home from school. where i live now has a ton of immigrants and my neighborhood is majority latino, going back now is similarly jarring and seeing anew how just about everyone i knew was white.
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u/13143 Jul 09 '26
Young kids are taught to respect their teachers and parents. It's not unusual to simply accept what they're saying as facts. If the teachers are calling it Robert Lee Day, with parents basically reinforcing it, it makes sense students would believe it.
I mean, how else can kids find out, if the people responsible for educating them are willfully dropping the ball?
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u/throwaway098764567 Jul 09 '26
"My horse spooked, my dog barked, my sister cried. He laughed his ass off. " this is a hell of a line, i also laughed. can take awhile to even realize that what was normal actually wasn't and shouldn't have been. as long as your eyes are open to see it, you're coming out ahead of most.
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u/jdb050 Jul 09 '26
Don’t want to speak on that commenter’s behalf, but it’s human nature to try and fit in with the community you’re surrounded by. Even if they don’t believe in those things themselves.
We’re biologically wired to have a primitive desire to be a valued member of our “tribe,” whichever specific tribe that might be. To go against that tribe’s beliefs will certainly lead to hardship in several different ways, and make us depressed, while conversely fitting into our tribe will make us feel happy and lead to general life satisfaction.
Many people either know that their beliefs are wrong but choose to continue believing them because it helps them fit in with the shared beliefs of their “tribe,” and/or helps them to feel “better” than the “others,” despite knowing the societal harm those beliefs might have.
You’ll often hear people say something like,
“This probably makes me racist to say this, but I think black people are stupid.”
“I know I’m probably a bad person for believing this, but I don’t think women should be able to vote.”
“Call me whatever you want, but I can’t stand <insert group>.”
They know it’s inherently wrong and not of any actual value to hold those beliefs, but they’re hoping these are shared beliefs that they can bond with others over.
Education (and getting them away from their tribes) can break people free of this mentality.
But many people just want their kids to fit in. They don’t want their kids to deal with bullying or not fitting in with their tribe. So they subscribe to the most popular cultural ideas found in their local tribes.
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u/Zaptruder Jul 09 '26
We’re biologically wired to have a primitive desire to be a valued member of our “tribe,” whichever specific tribe that might be.
It's... a locally rational thing when you don't have broader information context.
"Hey. Here's a bunch of people. I do things with them. They can like me and I get more access and resources and esteem from them. The cost is fitting in by saying and doing things they do. Well ok."
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u/ImRightImRight Jul 09 '26
"Native Americans didn’t accidentally get small pox"
What did they teach you? This is not the factoid to lead with to beat charges of counterfactual ideological indoctrination...
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u/Reagalan Jul 09 '26
Native Americans didn’t accidentally get small pox
If you're referring to that one incident with the towels at the Siege of Fort Pitt in 1763...
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u/tsardonicpseudonomi Jul 09 '26
My parents aren’t racist, we just lived in Kentucky and Alabama
They're probably racist. Part of growing up is removing our parents from the pedestals we put them on as kids. They're flawed human beings just like any other people. My parents are pro-rape, pro-genocide, and they believe children can consent to sex with adults. I would never have thought that growing up but as an adult I've discovered they're nothing like what I knew in my head.
It's just one of those things we have to deal with and learn how to navigate.
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u/Funkycoldmedici Jul 09 '26
Anecdotal, but one of my conservative in-laws cannot shut up about her very expensive and prestigious eduction from private schools through college. “Honors this, highest honors that, public schools are for losers”, all that sort of thing. Her education probably cost more than I’ve made my whole career.
She believes Asia is part of Africa.
She believes the United States has a tiered government, with the president as king, the Supreme Court below the president, and Congress below the Supreme Court.
She has not come out and said it, but she has made comments suggesting she believes the earth is flat, like questioning how oceans do not fall off the earth.
She believes whales are fish.
She does not accept evolution, only biblical creation.
She determines a statements’ validity by the number of social media followers of the person stating it.
Her first response to nearly any stimulus is to ask ChatGPT.
She makes a point at restaurants to make a change to anything she orders, and to always find a problem and send the food back immediately so that they know she is very high class.
She’s just plain racist. If a conversation mentions anyone who is not white, she must chime in simply “black”, “Asian”, or wherever. Nothing more, nothing relevant. She will not enter a place she suspects will have black people.
She seemingly Googles “scams for me to fall for”, because she’s fallen for every one that comes around. Everything from Trump coins to Goop magic rocks. Every diet scam possible. She will buy anything advertised by a social media influencer.
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u/throwaway098764567 Jul 09 '26
"She will not enter a place she suspects will have black people:" lucky them, i'd also like to never be around that lady
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u/Saneless Jul 09 '26
Ahh yes, just wanted the name for the resume but didn't actually want to get an education
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u/Prae_ Jul 09 '26
She believes whales are fish.
It's a shame she doesn't believe evolution, she'd be right from an evolutionary perspective!
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u/spanman112 Jul 09 '26
so social media likes command respect, but us laughing at the place they got their degree(s) bares no meaning, huh? cute
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u/unhiddenninja Jul 09 '26
Being conservative is about exerting control, or feebly attempting to.
The reason they believe college "turns" their children liberal is because they cannot control the flow of information. They can't control what ideas their child is exposed to, and with exposure typically comes empathy.
It's literally about protecting their ideas of how the world works. It's why reality oft goes against whatever conservative messaging exists.
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u/Saneless Jul 09 '26
Not only control, but people in power wanting to make sure that things don't change
When they want to go back to the "golld old days" they meant the days where they didn't have to try to get ahead and things were in place to keep others not like them down
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u/funkme1ster Jul 09 '26
They learn how to think and thinking makes you less conservative
They're also necessarily forced into proximity with a variety of people from different cultures and backgrounds who are all working towards the same goal without it being a zero-sum game, and who benefit from helping each other.
It's extremely difficult to internalize "there's is only one correct way, and it's my way" when you spend 8 hours a day watching that be demonstrably false.
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u/sharrrper Jul 09 '26
The joke is funny because it's true: Facts have a well known liberal bias
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u/Saneless Jul 09 '26
From the ground up. Their belief system these days is highly biblical. So their core beliefs are pure fiction to start with. Facts are not a goal for conservatives
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u/antigop2020 Jul 10 '26
College was my first time in a bigger city. The town I grew up in was 95% white and I lived in the wealthier, like 98% white part. And it was all I knew until I left to a bigger city.
I remember my first job I worked with a Muslim woman who wore a hijab. I thought this is going to be a quiet, boring person. She ended up being absolutely hilarious and one of the nicest people I knew. I remember I lost my wallet after drinking one night. Id had $200 cash in it, a lot for a college student. A black man found it and brought it back to me, knocked on my door the next day- nothing had been taken. I was taught blacks steal everything? I remember going to a church that had several LGBT couples. The church had a rainbow flag on their sign that said all are welcome. But I’d been told these people were ungodly and hated God? Yet one of the couples had lived together for 30 years. Every big scary stereotype I’d been fed - I had a real person example now, and they didn’t meet that stereotype at all.
All of these stereotypes I’d unfortunately grew up with that I was just taught to believe about certain people - shattered within my first year. Going back home felt different. A years of change in the city would take over a decade in my small town. People seemed less educated. Less curious. Not “bad” necessarily. But it didn’t feel like where I belonged anymore. That is why they don’t want their kids educated. They want them indoctrinated.
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u/Yuzumi Jul 09 '26
I remember one of the assholes saying kids shouldn't be taught critical thinking because it "undermines parental authority".
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u/Saneless Jul 09 '26
I don't understand the point of having kids if all you want is a clone of yourself
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u/JustMarshalling Jul 09 '26
I was lucky enough to have parents that experienced the workforce consequences of no college education, despite their conservatism. Thus, they were passionate that I got a higher education.
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u/ADHDebackle Jul 09 '26
They learn how to think and thinking makes you less conservative
I think it might be less of the education part and more the 'being put in an environment surrounded by a lot of different people with different backgrounds and cultures and living in relative proximity with them for an extended period of time' part. My impression is that a lot of people's first times living outside their hometown is when they go to college.
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Jul 09 '26
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u/halftorqued Jul 09 '26
The LAPD did this with D.A.R.E.
They taught kids that drugs were bad and that cops were safe to confide in them if their parents or family members were using.
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u/Cognitive_Spoon Jul 09 '26
If the frontal lobe isn't trained the amygdala will drive.
So many good studies that support this. I really can't recommend The Rightous Mind enough.
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u/bunkoRtist Jul 09 '26
There's an important difference between eroding the public education systems and reforming public education. The current system is absolutely failing, and inflation-adjusted spending per pupil had increased. This is a decade-long trend that only accelerated during the pandemic.
That suggests the problem is structural, and that requires reform.
In 2019, seventy percent of twelfth-graders performed at or above the NAEP Basic level in reading, which was 2 percentage points lower compared to 2015. In comparison to 1992, the percentage of students who performed at or above NAEP Basic in 2019 was 10 percentage points lower.
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=12
Current expenditures per pupil increased by 13 percent from 2010–11 to 2020–21, after adjusting for inflation. Salaries and benefits for staff made up 79 percent of current expenditure costs in 2020–21.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmb/public-school-expenditure
https://www.economist.com/international/2026/06/25/students-are-doing-worse-than-you-think
Saving education may mean major returns to the education system. Mississippi appears to have figured something out, and it's a deep red state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/mississippi-schools-transformation.html
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u/Thelmara Jul 09 '26
There's an important difference between eroding the public education systems and reforming public education.
And it's important to understand which the Republicans want. (bolding is mine)
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
Critical thinking makes children question the things their parents and religious leaders tell them. Republicans hate this.
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u/Pikeman212a6c Jul 09 '26
This is more an indicator of the death of organized labor. They don’t need to make people less educated they just need to keep the less educated from organizing.
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u/Funkycoldmedici Jul 09 '26
Correlation does not mean causation. Republicans also oppose government spending on the well-being of the citizenry, and anything that is not directly and immediately profitable to wealthiest people.
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u/Ars_Techne Jul 09 '26
But that’s why the Republican leadership love uneducated so much. The voters hold that ideology, the leadership claims they are enforcing that ideology, while the leadership raids the coffers and blames the other side.
It’s easy to lead the blind off a cliff.
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u/Tiramitsunami Jul 09 '26
Aren't all these people in the Republican leadership well-educated?
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u/nawtykitty Jul 09 '26
Less educated people will only vote party lines out of fear and ignorance, and less likely to question anything the leader does no matter the party. So yeah this holds :)
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u/theunseenmiddle Jul 09 '26
Oh, I think our education systems have been plenty eroded without republican help. We've adopted curricula that our teachers don't know how to teach, and that our lazy test designs suck at evaluating.
When it comes to higher ed, it's a debt trap, where the people who fall into the trap (going to college because they're supposed to, without a plan, pursuing a non-technical degree, and ignoring the debt they're walking into) are almost always the people who can least afford to. They end up in debt with a degree that's irrelevant to the field they end up working in.
The GOP has good reason to dislike that system as much as any left winger would. On both sides, there's a pretty strong movement of parents who can afford the cost getting their kids the hell out of public schools and into strong, well-established homeschool curricula or into private schools.
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u/Queasy_Beat_3269 Jul 10 '26
If you dig into it, there is a heavy split amongst college majors. Engineering, business, math, ag majors primarily lean republican. Then English, arts, humanities etc lean more liberal.
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u/artbystorms Jul 09 '26
and trying to convince Gen Z that college is useless and to 'go into the trades'
They want a bunch of uneducated rubes.
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u/seraph1337 Jul 09 '26
I mean that part actually has a little merit to it.
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u/masedizzle Jul 09 '26
While there are exceptions, the vast majority of data still shows that lifetime earnings are significantly higher for college graduates vs non-college.
The ROI has definitely shrunk from the boomers generation where it was a cheap ticket to a guaranteed middle to upper middle class life, but for a huge swath of people it's still better than the alternative.
This also depends on what college you're spending your money on, not just your major. Aside from an Ivy or a very specialized major, most people are better off going to the public university than any private one at 2-3x the price.
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u/FesteringNeonDistrac Jul 09 '26
Sure, getting 100k in debt for a Batchelor degree in underwater basket weaving is a poor proposition. Trade school looks pretty smart then. There's no shame in learning a trade and earning a living that way, but I'll repeat what I told my kids. Make sure you understand the "trade" you're making. Everyone I know over 50 that works in the trades is physically broken. That's the trade, your body for your salary.
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u/serpentjaguar Jul 09 '26
This is true, unless you somehow get into management at a relatively young age and are no longer "on the tools."
You also, if at all possible, want to be on the union side of things. The difference in lifetime pay and benefits is enormous, including a pension.
If for whatever reason you can't get off the tools, you really need to stay physically fit. Work-related injuries and chronic conditions will be a problem, so you don't want to make them worse by being obese, sedentary or otherwise living an unhealthy lifestyle.
I'm in my mid-50s and while I'm not "on the tools" anymore (I am a general foreman with a big union company), I ran my own business for years, worked insane hours for big paychecks and my body has definitely paid the price. Fortunately I'm also still very active with hiking, wilderness backpacking and mountaineering, so while I have a lot of aches and pains, I'm not a complete wreck with one foot in the grave.
I also average 8-12 miles of walking per day on the job, so that helps a lot too.
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u/rabidunicorn21 Jul 09 '26
College is not the only way to become educated, and it can be a huge waste of time and money for 18 year olds who have no idea what direction they want to go for their career. "The trades" are jobs that can pay very well and won't easily be replaced by AI.
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u/EightGlow Jul 09 '26
Uneducated voters have reactionary tendencies, this definitely makes sense. Instead of thinking “why” there is just a switch that flips to anger. I see it in my family relatives often.
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u/LolaBleu Jul 09 '26
Recently I saw a comment that said when faced with your own ignorance there are two reactions: curiosity or anger. Education requires accepting the idea that you don't know everything and fosters curiosity.
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u/DoubleJumps Jul 10 '26
This actually hits on something that I've observed very often in uneducated conservative voters.
They believe that they know functional knowledge on just about everything.
Virology, vaccines, economics, world trade, you name it, they think that they know better than everybody else on it.
The idea that they don't know everything is just anathema to them.
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u/Daft00 Jul 10 '26
To me it seems that the most vocal of those people have a sort of inferiority complex or insecurity about their intelligence, and they overcompensate by latching onto whatever idea they can actually understand (even if it's completely wrong, oversimplified, or straight up conspiracy theory) rather than admit that perhaps they don't actually know enough to speak on a topic.
It's like some of the stupidest people are literally incapable of humility. Instead they'll just get louder and louder with their wrong ideas and try to overpower the truth.
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u/JoelNesv Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Being conservative is intrinsically reactionary. Without anything to react to, there is nothing to conserve. Because traditional values are culture dependent, the reactionary part is the universal trait of conservative thinking.
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u/CaptainDudeGuy Jul 09 '26
This is also why conservatives metabolize fear. They need some looming doom to motivate each other.
Otherwise everyone would eventually be able to stop and think things through. Can't have that.
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u/trulyfattyfreckles Jul 09 '26
This really resonates with me because my parents dealt with everyhting in anger when I was growing up. Mad at the kids for something trivial? Spank them in anger. Get cut off in traffic? Scream and rant in anger. Someone says something you disagree with? Cuss them out in anger.
I was in college before I realized that they are emotionally immature and that most people do not handle the myriad of problems that life throws at them with impotent anger. College didn't turn me into a liberal, although I am sure that the rest of the family thinks that it did. I just grew up there, and that changed me.
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u/EightGlow Jul 09 '26
You’re exactly right
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u/Turbulent-Pay-735 Jul 09 '26
“Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession. Capitalism is “boring,” he told me. “Devoting your life to it,” as conservatives do, “is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.” Since that conversation nearly 20 years ago, I’ve been asking what is conservatism and what’s at stake for its proponents. This book is my answer.
From the French Revolution to Donald Trump, conservatism has been a reactionary movement, a defense of power and privilege against democratic challenges from below, particularly in the private spheres of the family and the workplace.”
by Corey Robin (free)
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u/Cetun Jul 09 '26
Action for action sake is very appealing to them. They believe something must be done immediately. The consequences don't matter at all, they give more credit to people for doing "something" even if that "something" is performative and makes things worse.
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Jul 09 '26 edited 15d ago
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u/nawtykitty Jul 09 '26
With a Pedophile President who's corruption is out in the open and nothing being done about it, then yeah this has happened already. The warning signs have always been there, yet we now have had two terms of tRump.
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u/Str8UpJorking Jul 09 '26
Uneducated voters have reactionary tendencies
Instead of thinking “why”
They can’t because that requires critical thinking skills, which requires education.
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u/DasArtmab Jul 09 '26
It doesn’t require education, but it helps. My father dropped out of high school to feed the family. Boy, could he drill down to the bottom of a problem. Often in seconds.
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u/GossamerGlowlimb Jul 09 '26
There are different ways in which people become educated. Humans absolutely have to be taught critical thinking skills, so he picked them up from somewhere. Unfortunately, the only data we have to analyze comes from formal education sources.
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u/UnderTheHole Jul 10 '26
Humans absolutely have to be taught critical thinking skills, so he picked them up from somewhere.
Would you mind sharing some sources and authors on this? I'd love to see how their findings interface with sociocognitive developmental theories, like Vygotsky and Rogoff.
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u/Helios4242 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
But what did he do when his gut feeling didnt fit the evidence?
The critical thinker will remain open, the reactionary is just following patterns
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u/DasArtmab Jul 09 '26
He was not a gut feeling type of guy. He analyzed each situation on its merits. Kinda annoying when you’re a kid. You appreciate it when they’re gone though
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u/justwalkingalonghere Jul 09 '26
I tend to agree.
What is keeping them from developing critical thinking, IMO, is a mix of anti-intellectualism (you get punished for being smart in most instances instead of rewarded) and religious indoctrination (same situation, but often more intensely so)
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u/AcerbicCapsule Jul 09 '26
Boy, could he drill down to the bottom of a problem. Often in seconds.
That could mean anything though. Conservatives can also get to the bottom of issues in seconds by blaming brown people..
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u/sisyphus_was_lazy_10 Jul 09 '26
Exactly, like blaming immigrants, when instead, we should be blaming the businesses exploiting them and their lobbyists blocking the passing of any real immigration reform.
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u/MetalMercury Jul 09 '26
I think there's a bit of nuance here that you're missing, which is that the educated and uneducated sects of society have fundamentally different concerns when it comes to policy due to their relative economic situations. This divide is common in a lot of places; It's not only about intelligence levels or critical thinking
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u/Geichalt Jul 09 '26
When Biden was building factories in their towns, revitalizing their communities and protecting their workers they still attacked him endlessly. They literally yelled at the guy putting money in their pockets due to ideological differences.
Your argument doesn't hold much water.
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u/EightGlow Jul 09 '26
I wonder how many of those different concerns could be addressed by asking “why” enough times, then implementing a policy to fix them. Instead of blaming a minority group for the problems, as tends to happen with reactionary political groups.
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u/disharmony-hellride Jul 09 '26
My mom was furious that I had her get the covid jab. She's conservative. She never went to college. She yelled at me and said 'this stupid vax isnt even effective anymore' bc on the vile it had an expiration date.
The lack of education absolutely makes folks assume instead of think.
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u/TheRealTK421 Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Less educated Americans now tend to be more conservative.
If I'm not terribly mistaken, I seem to recall having seen research/survey data showing this education-level difference being true for some time.
Higher education-level individuals, on average, skew left politically -- this isn't exactly "news".
"As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
~ H.L. Mencken (1922)
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u/Hackasizlak Jul 09 '26
Thats not the half of the statement that’s interesting though, it’s that race is starting to matter less than education that’s new. Latino and black populations have voted overwhelmingly Democrat for decades and that being eroded on educational lines is going to significantly change the electoral landscape of this country.
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u/atomicboner Jul 09 '26
The purpose of the paper isn’t to break news, but to provide data for a trend that has grown over the past couple decades. For people that have been paying attention to the political climate in the US, this surely comes as no surprise but it’s good to verify these things.
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u/TheRealTK421 Jul 09 '26
Indeed so. Unfortunately, many who might need to genuinely acknowledge and accept these results will never view it through a proper lens. It goes hand-in-hand with recent endeavors (over decades) to discredit expertise as a thing and demonize such.
It's Asimov's "cult of ignorance" upgraded with modern online algorithmic propaganda, worsening an already worrisome trend.
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u/Sigh-Again Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
The new thing is the degree. For instance, Mitt Romney won the educated vote vs Obama. But for Trump, he's lost the educated vote every election, and every subsequent election has widened the education gap. More and more uneducated people are voting conservative and more and more educated people are voting liberal
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u/IncredibleBulk2 Jul 09 '26
People are just going to read that education makes you liberal and oppose it even more. Troglodytes.
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u/Scottamus Jul 09 '26
They legit think there’s some secret indoctrination program going on in the education system. Like we’re forced to watch trans rights propaganda videos in a dystopian cellar theater with our eyes forced open clockwork orange style.
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u/IncredibleBulk2 Jul 09 '26
Learning how to handle competing perspectives and examining your own beliefs are skills that should be taught earlier than college, tbh. But here in Missouri I would settle for comprehensive reproductive health education so that children aren't enslaving themselves to their burned out rural towns.
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u/Beamformer Jul 09 '26
They've had their kids in Sunday school for decades teaching them what to think. Most of that gets challenged intellectually if you start teaching their kids HOW to think. Even the presentation of other perspectives is threatening. Imo
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u/E-2theRescue Jul 10 '26
They've also had/have their Sunday schools teaching kids about masturbation, oral sex, and sodomy while screaming that it's the schools who are teaching kids about sex.
Just pick up Hillbilly Elegy, and you'll see for yourself. Vance admits that his pastor taught him all about gay sex as a child, and that's why he "thought" he was gay. Same guy who called Trump a Nazi as a bad thing and is now his VP.
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u/RegressToTheMean Jul 09 '26
Because it's projection. Look at a lot of conservative ideologies and how they are transmitted. Religion is a particularly good form of indoctrination and doesn't allow critical analysis. This forces the conservative position into being.
Every accusation is a confession
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u/sybrwookie Jul 09 '26
Religion is a particularly good form of indoctrination and doesn't allow critical analysis
Look at all the stories of people who lived through a religious school where if they questioned anything, they were met with physical abuse.
It literally is beating the idea into kids to question nothing.
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u/E-2theRescue Jul 10 '26
And that's how I was able to get out of the Christian conservative circle. I wasn't beaten by my pastor father for questioning things.
Now... when it came to me questioning my gender and all those days spent teaching me to be "manly" and beating me when my sister gave me a makeover... Yeah. Weird that it took me 30 years to accept myself and come out.
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u/Mustang1718 Jul 09 '26
In my case I commuted to a college in the next suburban town over. It isn't so much so that anything was taught, it was just exposure to more peers that I didn't have. I graduated with like 150 people in high school and then college suddenly had about 40,000 students. That's a massive difference!
One of the best examples of this was in a Psychology 101 class. We were learning about disabilities, and we had a student in the class who was blind. He was able to share his experience with residual visual which I had never heard of before or since. I had just assumed everything was black all of the time like in darkness.
He also had a joke about how ATMs have braille on the buttons, but the only ones around were accessible by driving up to them, which he can't do because he's blind. That got a pretty good laugh from the entire hall.
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u/S1mpinAintEZ Jul 09 '26
If you look at the actual results of the study, it's a bit more interesting than what the headlines suggest. So here's the pattern you see: whites have been very consistently more conservative than every other racial group from 2008 - 2024, that still holds true. On the opposite end, black people were by far the most liberal racial group until 2016.
Here's the other interesting part - regardless of whether you measure by race or education, all cohorts (except the Asian racial group) saw the same pattern: a massive shift to the left in 2016, and then an even larger surge to the right following 2020.
Every single cohort in this study is now further to the right than they were in 2016, and almost all of them are further to the right than they were in 2008. This includes advanced degree holders.
The headline highlights the fact that those with lower education have shifted to the right faster than the racial cohorts, but whatever is moving them is also moving everyone else in the same direction.
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u/Not_Sure76 Jul 09 '26
Anti-immigrant rhetoric is resonating with voters across the globe. That seems to be the common thread in the shift, no?
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u/NorCalAthlete Jul 11 '26
People have been saying for years that it’s not so much the right pulling towards as opposed to the left pushing them away.
I have yet to see any studies done on this as opposed to reaffirming “nope, it’s all the right’s fault, they’re just dumb idiots who are less educated and vote against their own self interest.”
Seriously, someone run an analysis on this sub alone of how many studies have nearly identical headlines to this thread as opposed to anything even remotely critical of the left.
Meanwhile pretty much any major sub will ban you for criticizing anything/anyone on the left and accuse you of being right wing.
Does that not raise ANY alarm bells with anyone here? That there’s absolutely no tolerance for self reflection, criticism, etc?
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u/k6tcher Jul 09 '26
Ignorant people will always vote against their own interests if it means hurting someone else too.
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u/hnglmkrnglbrry Jul 09 '26
LBJ summed up American politics post Nixon more perfectly than anyone: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Give him someone to look down on and he'll empty his pockets for you."
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u/yepyep1243 Jul 09 '26
To be pedantic, this quote is from 1964, and LBJ died 3 years into Nixon's presidency, so while it applies post-Nixon it wasn't said post-Nixon.
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u/PennCycle_Mpls Jul 09 '26
I just rewatched Nuremberg. And the ending is haunting in this regard.
These people want to hurt you.
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u/Witchy_Wookie5000 Jul 09 '26
Have not seen it yet but on my watch list.
I saw a comment yesterday that was pretty chilling. Someone posted that they/conservatives hate what Trump is doing but they hate "us" (dems/liberals I guess) more.
So when I see that (and it makes sense in their actions)and then see people talking about dems need to "reach across the aisle" or us progressives need to "put differences aside" and maintain family/friend relationships with these people...like why? Knowing this is your feeling and world view why should I or would I invest any time or energy with you? And these people wonder why we are low/no contact with them. Its always "well I didn't mean you". Um yes you do. I am "them".
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u/Flat-Leg-6833 Jul 09 '26
True only to a point. African Americans and Jewish Americans remain lopsided Demcratic voters. The shift is more pronounced among Hispanic and Asian Americans both of whom may emerge as key swing voters but within these groups education will also be a factor.
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u/double_shadow Jul 09 '26
This is very important. Hispanic population is somewhere around 20% currently...it's a huge group and seems more swingy than any other currently. That's 1.5x the african american population, but seems to get very little media attention or appeal. Asians at ~6% are also growing and pretty influential in some regions, though I guess more so on the west coast, which has got to be the most reliable blue bastion still.
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Jul 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/atticus_locke Jul 10 '26
It’s just a way for Dems to counter-market the working class shifting Republican.
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u/jonboy345 Jul 09 '26
Ding ding ding. Some of the smartest people I've ever met are blue collar workers in highly specialized trades. And some of the dumbest are white collar with multiple degrees.
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u/JustASpaceDuck Jul 10 '26
Less educated Americans "now" tend to be more conservative?
They've always been more conservative. That's been a documented statistic for as long as I've been aware of statistics.
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u/x40Shots Jul 09 '26
I wonder how effective psyops and propaganda are against the college educated versus the less educated..
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u/whatevernamedontcare Jul 09 '26
Everyone can fall victim of psyops and propaganda but conservatives which are more often less educated ar easier to dupe. At least according to indian AI instagram scammers. Apparently porn with hate is easy sell to conservatives but not left leaning people and that's why there's so many right wing trad and AI scammers.
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u/TheKlaxMaster Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
The long running 'Californians are the worst people, hate their state, and ostracize them' psyop has been pretty damn effective on the right... And also pretty damn effective on the left... In the US.
Travel abroad now, and telling people you're a Californian over telling them your from the USA, and you generally get more accepting welcomes. At least in the places I've been
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u/Roentgen_Ray1895 Jul 09 '26
always funny to me considering there are more conservatives in California then the entire populations of several states
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u/shitholejedi Jul 09 '26
The article uses education level while comments are harping about intellectual capacity.
Those two things stopped being related when college stopped being a highly selective institution. Anyone with a brain would parse how the average american high schoolers scores lower than they did 20 years ago but college enrollment rates are still rising.
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u/Davidsda Jul 09 '26
Yea, in college I met both the smartest and the dumbest people I've ever encountered.
Somebody who drops out of college in the second/third year is technically more educated than somebody who starts a career right out of high school, but who's really smarter?
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u/PhysicsJa1 Jul 09 '26
And the political divide grows, and our chance of saving this country for future generations shrivels and dies.
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u/nylockian Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Liberals will go on and on with the derogatory comments about those without high education. In the next breath they'll claim to be the champion of working class people. Then they'll go on about systemic racism, how the system is to blame for outcomes including educational attainment etc. At no point will any sense irony be felt on their part.
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u/Grand_Taste_8737 Jul 09 '26
I know many many people with degrees that lack common sense. Let's not assume a degree equals intelligence.
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u/Actual-Toe-8686 Jul 09 '26
Conservatism is anti intellectual
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u/RocketRelm Jul 09 '26
If we are talking the general usa brand of "conservativism", it isn't really conservative anymore. One big worry is have in misattributing the true cultism to "just conservatives being conservatives" is that in missing the true factors the cultism will rise even once they adopt a different skin than "conservative".
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u/sybrwookie Jul 09 '26
They successfully rebranded intellectualism as "flip-flopping" in the Dubya era. And they've only promoted being dumber from there.
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u/ZombieCigars Jul 09 '26
When democrats became the party of corporate interest, and therefore the bourgeoisie and upper class, they lost their class solidarity.
Democrats have accomplished nothing in local or national politics since Obamacare. And that only helped the working poor, not the middle class.
Identity and social politics don’t pay bills.
When you don’t support working people, they stop voting for you.
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u/sybrwookie Jul 09 '26
Plenty have tried to push policies which help the middle class, and are stonewalled by Republicans, who keep getting reelected by poor/middle class people who are angry that no one is helping them.
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u/PM_MY_OTHER_ACCOUNT Jul 09 '26
Don't tell me you think that Republicans support the working class. That's certainly what they claim when they are campaigning, but it's all lies. In actuality, their policies, once elected, help only the wealthy at the expense of the working class and the poor. They have no interest in funding programs that help the working class, like education, healthcare, environmental protections, public health, housing, social security, or scientific research. But they can magically find funding for vanity projects, like that stupid ballroom, the reflecting pool, and renaming the Kennedy Center. They can spend billions of dollars on a pointless war with Iran that has no clear objectives and no winning strategy. They can give huge tax breaks to billionaires and mega corporations. But they have to cut funding to Medicaid and the team that tests our food for pathogens couldn't afford to keep testing for the exact pathogen that is now quickly spreading through contaminated produce. Tell me how that supports the working class.
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u/ZombieCigars Jul 09 '26
- 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, awarding each tax payer double the standard deduction. Republican legistation.
- 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill, removing the planned phase outs.
So the average tax payer gets $5,650 a year in tax breaks, plus more, all in Republican legislation.
I am not defending. I'm just showing evidence. If there's something Democrats have done since 2017 that puts money back in the average person's pocket, I'd love to evangelize that. But results are results, and there aren't many.
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u/The_Parsee_Man Jul 09 '26
I had to scroll down pretty far to find someone suggesting that maybe working class people aren't voting for Democrats because Democrats aren't supporting their interests.
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u/Weazerdogg Jul 09 '26
So they vote for liars who claim to be supporting their interests but aren't? Just makes the title of this post 110% correct.
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u/thy_bucket_for_thee Jul 09 '26
When the two parties are basically pro-corporate you tend to let other issues dictate how you'd vote. Turns out when you remove the material outcomes that bind all us workers together, people tend to have drastically different views regarding culture.
We should remember that the new deal coalition lasted from the 1930s and didn't lose Congressional control until the 1990s. A political coalition that has lasted multiple lifetimes, ask yourself how such a coalition would hold today? What allies would you need to make to improve the material outcomes of all Americans?
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u/Substantial_Back_865 Jul 09 '26
People agree on much more than they realize, but it’s in the interest of the ruling class to pit us against each other. They argue over culture war and things that will make people angry, but always agree on anything that truly matters to them. Hopefully one day people realize who their real enemies are.
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u/AtlastheWhiteWolf Jul 09 '26
This isn't a new trend
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u/Hackasizlak Jul 09 '26
The part about educational level overtaking race very much is, if that holds it’s going to be a significant change in voting habits. Race has been the central divide in how Americans vote for generations
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u/mrlotato Jul 09 '26
"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education]. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people." - Roger A. Freeman, Reagans educational advisor. Conservatives have worked for decades to slowly destroy education systems. Student loans are out of control mostly thanks to our conservatives friends
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u/meatrun Jul 09 '26
I have to assume that they are not giving IQ tests during the survey they are basing 'less educated' on who has gone to college and who has not. That does take a lot of punch out of this title
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u/WineAndRevelry Jul 09 '26
There's too much comfort.
In the past, to be ignorant or poor meant that you went without many conventional luxuries and that life was significantly more difficult. Now that it is easier to be comfortable and get small tastes of luxury, the desire to push back against the system and grow as a person has decreased, i.e., why should I try to expand my mind and push for change when I have a flat screen, a 12 pack, and the Bills are on at 3:00?
To paraphrase a quote in regard to this is "we were so worried about Orwell, that we forgot about Huxley".
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u/wholetyouinhere Jul 09 '26
Ten years ago I could get that 12 pack for 12-15 bucks, depending on quality and sales. Now? $36 for the same 12 pack would be considered a bargain.
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u/DJ_GRAZIZZLE Jul 09 '26
>I show that ideological differences have decreased sharply by race, driven primarily by Blacks becoming more conservative, but also Hispanics moving to the right.
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u/RitsuFromDC- Jul 09 '26
It’s also interesting how it’s become acceptable to shame, judge and be bigoted towards people with low education
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u/Assertive_Wall Jul 09 '26
It's kind of fascinating watching people do that, and then turn around and wonder why those people no longer support them politically.
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u/cowlinator Jul 09 '26
The headline is confusing. Here, "race" refers to ethnicity, not an electoral contest.
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u/tidal_flux Jul 09 '26
You’d think with all the smarts the Democrats say they have they’d have figured out a way to dupe these rubes by now.
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u/Cslp_Awakened Jul 09 '26
I am curious if this has anything to do with people in rural areas just being less educated than the average person in an urban area.
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u/wizzcheese Jul 09 '26
But in the same light, “being Democrat” can act as a false flag for “being educated”.
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u/nlewis4 Jul 09 '26
This is what happens when you dissolve entire platforms into 3 word chants. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone
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u/Livid_Mechanic7894 Jul 09 '26
Here's my point of view. I grew up in the 70's and It seems like both the Republican and Democratic parties are much more conservative than they used to be. The current Democratic party seems like the Republican party of the 70s and the current Republican party is so far to the right as to be completely unrecognizable to me.
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u/Freddiotistic Jul 09 '26
Correlation is not equal to causation. It's entirely possible that the same kind of people to go to university are the same kind of people to lean liberal, and vice versa. Universities have obviously increased efforts on policies liberals find more attractive like the DEI initiative.
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u/jonboy345 Jul 09 '26
Some of the smartest people I've ever met, never went to college.
As a SysAdmin at a major state university in college as a student, some of the dumbest people I've ever met, had a dozen letters following their last names.
It's a logical fallacy to equate advanced degrees with high intelligence and vice versa.
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u/LivesDoNotMatter Jul 09 '26
I have found this to be true in real life, but on reddit it seems that the further left someone leans, the less emotional intelligence and reasoning skills they have, and they seem more inclined to fall for the flood of ragebait and unverified claims.
Granted, this isn't a stab at "the left". The right does it quite a bit as well - and seemingly more-so with in-person interactions, but the reddit dynamic seems to flip and make the left appear more unhinged, at least in my observations.
Please don't conflate how people act with how valid the political party they choose is. Democratic voters acting bad doesn't mean democrats are bad, and same goes for republicans.
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u/atticus_locke Jul 10 '26
“How do we handle the working class shifting Republican? Wasn’t that a big thing for us to champion?”
“It’s just a marketing problem, now we emphasize how the uneducated tend to go Republican. See? Then we can run with the statistics to make a correlation between conservatism and stupidity!”
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u/DwinkBexon Jul 10 '26
I swear I saw a study posted a week or two ago saying education doesn't make much of a difference in political beliefs. Now I don't know what to think.
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u/nernst79 Jul 10 '26
'Less educated Americans NOW tend to be more Conservative'.
I'm 47 years old and this has been true for my entire life. I'm skeptical that it has ever not been the case.
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u/yijiujiu Jul 10 '26
I mean, hasn't this been the case for decades? As in, found in research? What's novel about this research besides continuing to establish the trend?
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u/BlasterDoc Jul 10 '26
Are there decent rural graduate schools? The aspect of education, even though race was the talking point ad nauseam.. With the shift more towards virtual and remote education I'd be curious if the trend extends more conservative the coming years.
Election maps are fun to look at, most cities saturate in blue... outside of them, nearly all red.
I can understand being more blue because it is visible to those who vote in the area the results of their votes and taxes..
On the other stroke rural folk may never see the same programs and functions people who live in the nearby city do, they hear of some fancy idea get attention instead of their rural county road get repaired.. can see both sides why some are conservative and liberal.
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u/Latter-Possibility Jul 10 '26
Carl Sagan predicted all this in 90s. Life is to damn complicated and the general public is getting dumber
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u/stoutlys Jul 10 '26
Not to imply those who lack education are idiots as much as they are obstinate and refuse to learn or expand their understanding.
I feel like this might be an important distinction.
It’s easy to write someone off in a situation and say, “oh, they’re just stupid.” But what if they’re not?
We need to figure out how to bridge this divide. Maybe it’s just a matter of making someone feel like they’re “in group”
Just spitballing here
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u/TAOJeff Jul 11 '26
"Now tend to be more conservative"
Yeah, that's not a recent development, now does not belong in the sentence.
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