On Wednesday night, we ran a post called “61% Of Stupid White People Now Say Trump Is Insane.”
Obviously, the title was a bit tongue-in-cheek – but not entirely.
It’s generally accepted that populism preys on the uneducated. And of course stoking nationalism and creating a palpable sense of xenophobia is a mainstay of the populist agenda.
So given that, it’s not a good sign for Trump that 61% of white, non-college-educated survey respondents answered “no” when asked if the President is “level headed.”
Did our post mean we think all people without college degrees are “stupid”? No. It just means that if you are a would-be populist autocrat, the one group you absolutely do not want to turn against you is the native-born, undereducated crowd. If you lose that, you’re fucked.
Here’s a chart that shows the steadily declining trend in that group’s support (it’s now net negative, or, in other words, white voters with no college degree disapprove 50 – 43 percent):
Of course one of the enduring criticisms of Trump is that he doesn’t care one way or another about the Middle Class. And to prove it, he’s staffed his White House with a cabal of super-wealthy bankers and robber barons. Oh, and a bunch of his relatives.
That brings us to this morning’s tweet about business confidence:
That’s great. But let’s look at a more granular breakdown of “enthusiasm” or “confidence” – as it were – to get a read on how folks without college degrees are feeling.
For that, we go to the following set of charts which break down The Bloomberg Weekly Consumer Comfort index into education cohorts.
These visuals depict consumer confidence among college graduates vs. the average of high school grads plus those with less than a high school education:
As you can see, the divergence between how college graduates are feeling and how everyone else is feeling has – if anything – only moved higher since Trump was elected.
Hilariously, that means that the people who are feeling the most “comfortable” about things (those with a college degree) are the same people who are predisposed to having an unfavorable opinion about Trump.
And that probably makes sense, because after all, his impeachment looks like more of a foregone conclusion with each passing day.
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