Thomas B. Edsall at NYT:
A widely circulated report issued earlier this month provides further detail on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The study, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” was produced by a group called More In Common, which says it seeks “to build communities and societies that are stronger, more united and more resilient to the increasing threats of polarization and social division.”
The report identified the most liberal constituency as “progressive activists,” a constituency that is expected to make up a quarter of Democratic voters this year, according to Stephen Hawkins, research director at More In Common.
These voters stand apart with “the highest levels of education and socioeconomic status” of all the groups studied. They are “highly sensitive to issues of fairness and equity in society, particularly with regards to race, gender and other minority group identities.” In addition, a third of progressive activists view political correctness as having gone too far, compared with 80 percent of the population as a whole.
There are a number of other areas where progressive activists differ from the average American, according to the More in Common study. Progressive activists are “more than twice as likely to say that they never pray (50 percent to 19 percent), “almost three times more likely to be ‘ashamed to be an American’ ” (69-24), eleven percentage points more likely to be white (80-69), and “twice as likely to have completed college (59-29).
Goldberg, the doctoral candidate at Georgia State University, has documented the changing character of the Democratic electorate in a working paper, “The 2016 Election and the Left’s Lurch Left.”
Using American National Election Studies data, Goldberg found that among white liberal women, the share identifying themselves as “feminist” rose from 45 percent in 1992 to 83 percent in 2016. For white liberal men, the percentage saying they were feminists grew from 34 to 59 percent.
