The Non-College Educated Man Problem
By 
Rhode Island is extremely far from a swing state. In fact, it is a very boring year in Rhode Island elections. The only possible election of interest is for mayor of Warwick. The current mayor is the ultimate in POLITICS WITHOUT POLITICS and got elected based on his work on….wait for it…having the biggest fucking Christmas lights display in town. So a Democrat is challenging him and has the teachers’ union endorsement at least. We’ll see.
But even in a state like this, you can find interesting things to talk about and this leads us to Sheldon Whitehouse’s reelection as senator. Whitehouse is awesome, love this guy, and there’s nothing to worry about her. His opponent is probably the single stupidest person I have ever interacted with in politics, Patricia Morgan. I mean this woman is an outright moron and I have very low expectations of people. So whatever, it doesn’t matter. But there is a poll and check out these insane crosstabs.
Senator Whitehouse leads Rep Morgan among 3 out of 4 gender/education subgroups: college-educated women (77%-18%), non-college women (63%-34%) and college-educated men (63%-32%)
But non-college men are a mirror image – they're breaking for Morgan, 67%-26% https://t.co/Mqwdc8ebGw
— Ted Nesi (@TedNesi) November 4, 2024
You can obviously win an election if you dominate all these groups by so much. But the problem of the non-educated man is very freaking big. Like, that’s a lot of people. The gender gap in non-college educated group is also astounding. Non college women are +29 for Whitehouse and non college men are -41!!!!!!!!
Now, I don’t have too much to offer here in terms of useful analysis except for one thing. Too often, and you definitely see this in comment sections, the response to the extreme right wing trends of lightly educated men is to say “fuck them, we don’t need them.” Well, that might barely be true for 2024. And certainly it is true in Rhode Island. But we also have to figure out messaging and ideas that appeal to some of these voters without turning off the other parts of the Democratic coalition. There are too many states we could win by just blunting this a little bit. What is it specifically about non-college educated men that is causing them to respond this way? Yes, for some it is race, but that’s far too simplistic and as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, you can’t really parse this out from other issues causing resentment too. Plus, while this poll doesn’t seem to ask about race, we know that plenty of Black and Latino men are on that train too, though not a majority. Misogyny is obviously a big piece of it, probably transphobia too, though I don’t have any sense why men would be that much more transphobic than women. Must be their deep concern for women’s sports….I suspect what ties all this together is a belief that the world is against them and they can see that in every part of society. There’s some level of truth to this for non-college educated folks, yes, but not specifically for men. We do have to figure this out and smug responses dismissing them doesn’t do that work.
The other thing this suggests is that a lot of women are married to these men and are saying that they are going vote for Trump and whoever the other Republicans are but in fact are going to vote for Democrats. I guess we will see how true that is this week.