Nate Silver is a data guy, number crunching, polling, and gaming are his jam. At his Silver Bulletin website, he looks at DSA demographics.
What is the most Democratic voting group in America? It’s voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year.
This is very much also the sweet spot for the DSA. In the group’s most recent member survey in 2021, 80 percent of members aged 25 or older had bachelor’s degrees, but 45 percent had household incomes below $60,000 per year.
This is unusual, because education and income are usually substantially positively correlated. In the composite CES data, only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that. These voters aren’t necessarily “blue collar” in the sense of working with their hands. But that doesn’t mean they’re privileged.
Silver concludes thus:
DSA members aren’t necessarily struggling to pay the bills, nor are most of them traditionally “blue-collar”. But they’re likely to be genuinely upset about their station in life as well as how things are going with the country.Translation: Most Democratic Socialists of America are overeducated and, by their own lights, underemployed. They do not earn enough to ever purchase a home.
