Posted on 12/11/2020 6:53:47 AM PST by Kaslin
Eighty-five percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden. That factoid, relayed by The Cook Political Report's David Wasserman, tells you something important about the election -- and about today's Democratic Party.
"The Democracy," as it was called in the 19th century, long thought of itself as the party of the people, the defender of the little guy, the side that stood up for the folks not able to stand up for themselves.
There was always something to this. From its formation to reelect Andrew Jackson in 1832, the Democratic Party has always been a coalition of groups not considered typical Americans but that together could form a national majority. Naturally, the precise composition of this coalition has changed over time.
Barack Obama's Democratic Party was a top-and-bottom coalition of those at both ends of the income, education and occupational scales. Obama, who, as an Illinois legislator, gerrymandered a top-and-bottom district for himself, provided substantive and psychological sustenance to both sides.
Joe Biden's Democratic Party has a different balance. The boy from working-class Scranton, as he is billed, ran best not in factory cities but in university towns.
His highest percentage in Michigan was in the county containing Ann Arbor, not Detroit. He ran stronger in Madison, Wisconsin's Dane County than in Milwaukee County; stronger in Iowa City than in Des Moines; stronger in Missoula, Montana, with its university than in Butte with its copper mines; just as strong in metro Columbus (Ohio State University) as in metro Cleveland.
Biden's strongest area in California was the San Francisco Bay (University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University). His strongest county in upstate New York was Tompkins (Cornell University). His strongest counties in North Carolina were Durham and Orange (Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).
White college grads -- Joel Kotkin's "gentry liberals," Arnold Kling's "highly educated elites" -- have become the dominant constituency in the Democratic Party. Even as the descendants of the party's blue-collar constituents have become Donald Trump Republicans, Democratic percentages among white college graduates have ballooned.
Pew Research Center polling showed white college graduates 50% to 42% Republican in 1994 -- the breakthrough year when Republicans captured the House after 40 years of Democratic control -- and 57% to 37% Democratic in 2019. That's happened even as they've become a larger percentage of the electorate.
To which an old-time Democratic Party boss -- Tammany Hall's Charles F. Murphy or Chicago's Richard J. Daley -- would have asked, "What do these people want?"
In the 1990s, the answers very fairly obvious. Affluent voters wanted tax rates held down, and they wanted their verdant suburban and trendy central city neighborhoods protected from violent crime and welfare dependency.
Led by Wisconsin's Tommy Thompson and New York's Rudy Giuliani, local Republicans and some Democrats cut violent crime and welfare rolls by more than half. In Washington, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton assisted and encouraged this process and largely froze tax rates.
Today's college graduates, more numerous than their 1994 predecessors and schooled on increasingly "politically correct" campuses, don't have such concrete goals. They're unfazed by marginal Obama-era tax increases and untroubled -- so far, anyway -- by the vertiginous increases in homicides after the May 25 incident in Minneapolis.
What they want out of politics is not so much anything concrete as it is symbolic: assertions of opposition to what they regard as America's "systemic racism," and opposition to assertions of "America first," whether that means enforcement of immigration laws or "xenophobic" restrictions on travel from China, where COVID-19 originated.
In Democratic primaries, these voters, as I wrote in June, "flitted from one candidate to the next, tilting toward Sen. Kamala Harris after she whacked Joe Biden for opposing busing in the 1970s, then luxuriating in Sen. Elizabeth Warren's stentorian assurances that, on every issue, 'I have a plan for that,' then swooning for the assured articulateness of then-South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg."
They seem chemically dependent on denunciations of Donald Trump, to the point that subscription- or ratings-hungry news media feel obliged to lard not just news accounts but even food pages and movie reviews with "Orange Man Bad" sneers. Trump is routinely described as a "racist" with no evidence cited.
White Democratic college graduates' central faith is that they oppose other Americans' systemic racism. Nearly a majority of them told pollsters they were bothered that Joe Biden is a white male in his 70s. Only about 30% of black and Hispanic Democrats feel the same, according to Pew. One group has more concern for ethnic origin and personal style than for real-life consequences for actual people.
White Democratic college graduates complain that Trump acts childishly; is impervious to criticism and fixated on symbolic trivia; and refuses to confess error or admit defeat. Fair criticism or self-description? Or both?
Barone is one of us just more gentlemanly about it.
Why do Democrats shop at Whole Foods?
To compensate for their tiny Priuses.
Whole Foods. Yep. Whacked-out extreme lefty former friend who has been cowering in his 3,500 square foot home since last April has had everything he and his wife need delivered to their home for over seven months. Classic leftist; hates America, hates God, hates being white, etc. Just hates. And wants our taxes to be higher (and we live in California. Good Lord.) AND the grocery store of exclusive preference? Whole Foods, of course. They get wildly overpriced groceries left on their porch several times a week (fresh seafood, don’t you know...). it’s a thing, this Whole Foods cult.
I do some shopping at Aldi
Republicans need to come up with a plan to reform education, to take it away from the Progs.
The CEO of Whole Foods is a market capitalist libertarian
Gee, there are only seven Whole Paycheck outlets in my county. (Middlesex, which includes “our* fair city”, as the Car Talk guys called it, Cambridge, as well as Brookline.) *Theirs, not mine.
White college graduates have become a larger percentage of the electorate since 1994? I don't think so.
They have a pretty good salad bar. I went there for lunch once or twice a week before COVID hit and our company went to 100% telework.
Has anyone ever seen a happy person in Whole Foods? A hint of a smile? Heard a laugh, a giggle, a chuckle? Any visible expression of not being a totally miserable hater?
Yes.
My sister and brother in law shop there. When we were visiting, we went with them to Whole Foods. My kids and nieces were laughing and playing quietly together. Made some people scowl (pretty common for an area where kids are viewed as bad), but some smile.
At some point, my sister bought a COSTCO membership and hasn’t been back.
Of course; and the fact that biden promised to forgive college debt had nothing to do with it!
Let me see: do I vote for the Republican who will keep my future taxes low and save me money in 10 years; or do I vote for the demonic-Rat who will immediately forgive $30-$150K of debt?
This is a no brainer even for those with degrees in Woke Studies.
“Has anyone ever seen a happy person in Whole Foods?”
Impossible to tell with the masks.
Whole Foods = Whole paycheck. You never see a smiling face there. Our whole family loves fresh salmon and WF had sockeye on sale if you ordered when they had it.
Having said, that, we have had 2 WF deliveries since this B$ started. We ordered seafood and fresh fruits/veggies. Free delivery when the order is over $30. Both times, my wife didn’t want to fix dinner or we just wanted sea food.
We love the Costco 2 hour delivery.
Then, we use the Walmart pickup about every 2-3 weeks. Order in the morning and pickup about mid after noon.
A pleasant surprise has been the Local Nob Hill stepping up
with good fresh veggies/fruits and sales on Mondays. Our local farmers’ stand closed the first week in November. The local Nob Hill converted their main entry into counters of fresh produce at good prices, inside the store.
A great pre election predictor: “If your county or city has a Whole Food store, Eighty-five percent of those counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden.”
I love Aldi.
Cheap, good stuff, and seasonal variance.
I wish that we had an Aldi!
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