Democrats win college grads, but not because those voters are smarter. Plus, Tapper should have skipped interviews.

By Gary Abernathy

Yes, most Americans with degrees vote for Democrats, but that’s not because they are smarter or better educated

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

We are constantly reminded that smart people vote for Democrats, dumber people vote for Republicans. Usually, it isn’t phrased quite that blatantly. What we are told is that people with college degrees favor Democrats over Republicans, but the implication is clear.

The point was made again over the weekend in an in-depth analysis from the New York Times of how much Donald Trump has reshaped the national political landscape.

Overall, it’s a good analysis. It finds, “All told, Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party’s share of the presidential vote in each election he’s been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America — 1,433 in all — according to an analysis by The New York Times. It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020. By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties.”

The study breaks down various demographic factors, including, of course, this one: “In not one of the counties where Mr. Trump steadily increased his share of the vote did a majority of adults have a college degree. And in not one of the counties voting more and more Democratic was the college-educated share of the adult population smaller than 20 percent.”

In other words, people with college degrees more often vote for Democrats, those without college degrees for Republicans. That stat is rolled out time and again, based on studies, and I don’t question the statistic’s validity.

What I do dispute is what it means to have a college degree. Rather than serving as a measure of intelligence or even knowledge, in this day and age a college degree increasingly means that someone has been politically indoctrinated by the left. Naturally, such a person would vote more heavily for Democrats.

This fact has become increasingly prevalent over the last several decades, as far-left radicals increasingly find themselves in positions of power in the most prestigious universities, particularly those that make up the Ivy League.

But Ivy League schools aren’t the only ones that are dominated by the beliefs of the political left. Even the faculties of most state universities are largely comprised of political progressives, and have been for decades. Talk to any of your children or grandchildren who have obtained degrees from any schools outside of the handful of conservative or religious schools that dot the landscape, and they will tell you how they learned to adopt the leftwing positions of their professors in order to receive passing grades.

As stated, this is not a new phenomenon, and it’s not even open for dispute. It’s long been understood. Twenty years ago, the Washington Post acknowledged the far-left tilt of most colleges and universities in a story based on a study of faculties across the country.

The following is an excerpt from the story:

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

"What's most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field," said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. "There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It's a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you'd expect to be dominated by liberals."

More recent surveys by individual schools focusing on their own faculties almost always find that the leftward tilt is even more pronounced, with faculties self-identifying as Democrats or liberals in the 60 to 75 percent range.

Some students who are grounded in their conservative or at least moderate political positions are not easily swayed by the far-left rhetoric of their college classrooms and curriculum. They provide the preferred answers and, inside the classroom, agree to the positions their professors demand, while still maintaining their identifies in the outside world.

But others fall prey to the radical left philosophies they’re bombarded with day after day and carry those doctrines with them throughout life, translating into a lifetime of support for leftwing movements, parties and candidates.

It is because our universities have, by and large, abandoned their mission of being centers of higher education and instead have become incubators of radical progressivism that the Trump administration has made it a point to expose them for what they are and attempted to reset how taxpayer dollars are used. Taxpayers should not be required to support the political agendas of the radical left at our colleges and universities.

At Harvard, where a war with Trump currently rages, the political makeup of the faculty is undisputed. This from the Harvard Crimson in 2023:

More than 77 percent of surveyed Harvard faculty identified as either “very liberal” or “liberal” in The Crimson’s annual survey of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Just under 32 percent of faculty respondents said they were “very liberal.” Approximately 45 percent of respondents identified as “liberal,” 20 percent as “moderate,” more than 2 percent as “conservative,” and less than 1 percent as “very conservative.”

Why is our government supposed to support the ideological bias that exists in the vast majority of our most renowned and important universities? Why are taxpayers supposed to help such universities create generations of far-left radicals — not to mention import them from other countries?

Institutions of higher learning can, of course, teach what they want and employ faculties of whatever political persuasion they prefer through private financing and donations. But the time has come to end the far-left indoctrination assembly line to the degree that it is funded in the form of operating revenue, research grants and various other contracts and grants by the tax dollars that come from Americans of all political ideologies.

Tapper would have been better off to put out his book and skip the interviews, since he has no good excuses

Jake Tapper would have been better off had he simply co-authored his book with Alex Thompson “exposing” the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline instead of embarrassing himself over and over by doing interviews on the subject.

One of Tapper’s most hypocritical comments came during an interview with Katie Couric, in which Tapper said this about Hunter Biden: “It’s bizarre because I think he is provably, demonstrably unethical, sleazy and prone to horrible decisions. Look at the record. After his brother died he cheated on his wife with his brother’s widow and then got her addicted to crack. That’s just one thing I could say. I don’t have a lot of personal regard for him.”

That’s astounding coming from someone who was part of the media’s Biden protection program.

For instance, back in 2020, Tapper said, "The rightwing is going crazy with all sorts of allegations about Biden and his family. Too disgusting to even repeat here. I mean, some of the ones I've seen from the president's son and some of the president's supporters are just wildly unhinged." Tapper was apparently alluding to allegations coming from President Trump and Trump’s son.

Even by 2022, after snaring a rare interview with President Biden, Tapper, like virtually all far-left (formerly mainstream) media, was treating both Joe and Hunter Biden with kid gloves, only asking one softball question to President Biden about his son on the Justice Department investigating Hunter for tax and gun charges: “Personally and politically, how do you react to that?" That’s it. No follow up.

The clip above from a recent interview with Tapper and Thompson is the full two hours of Megyn Kelly’s show that day, but the really interesting part starts at about the 14:30 minute mark, and I suggest watching about 10 or 15 minutes beyond that. She challenges Tapper in particular on his failure to cover the Biden issue in any significant way and, to a degree, he does something of a mea culpa — and claims that he called Lara Trump a few months ago to apologize to her for being hard on her after she raised concerns about Joe Biden’s condition.

Yes, the nightmare power outage that hit Spain, Portugal and parts of France could conceivably happen here

Photo by Ricardo IV Tamayo on Unsplash

In my latest column for The Empowerment Alliance, I discuss how the nightmare blackouts that recently hit Spain, Portugal and parts of France are entirely possible here if we don’t end the reckless experiment with “renewables” like wind and solar as replacements for natural gas and other fossil fuels.

I write:

Before President Trump reversed the previous administration’s war on fossil fuels, President Biden had committed the U.S. to reaching “100 percent clean electricity” by 2035 – a goal that seriously imperiled our own infrastructure. Biden’s corresponding attacks on affordable and reliable energy sources like natural gas were unrealistic and unpopular with many consumers who preferred gas appliances and heating sources over those that would be allowable under federal mandates.

Likewise, Spain is “currently aiming to phase out fossil fuel and nuclear generation in favor of renewables,” with a goal of renewables comprising 74 percent of total output by 2030, under the plan.

The insistence on replacing affordable, dependable energy with more expensive and unreliable alternatives is both illogical and impractical. Natural gas remains the most cost-effective, reliable and increasingly clean fuel choice in the world.

You can read the column in its entirety here.

Random thoughts on this and that …

Comey’s claim. If he’s being honest, former FBI Director James Comey claiming he did not realize that the term “86” can mean to terminate someone — assassinate someone — is further evidence that he never should have been FBI director, or even an agent, for that matter. To be that out of touch with common slang that he undoubtedly came across in his years at the bureau is beyond belief. (No, that picture above is not of him walking the beach just before he suddenly came upon a shell formation spelling out, “8647,” as he claims happened.)

Experts and lifers. A recent Washington Post story told us, with predictable alarm, that “Trump’s actions are pushing thousands of experts to flee government.” Hurray! Maybe we’ll all get a break from the flood of stories that routinely quote “experts” to counter any move Trump or other Republicans make. This line from the story was also telling: “Those exiting government, employees said, are people who entered public service right after college and never left.” Also known as “the entrenched bureaucracy.” There are many fine people doing effective work who have worked for years in government. But the fact is, government work was not intended to be a lifetime career. The ongoing downsizing will sometimes be bumpy, but if it returns us to anywhere near the limited government our founders envisioned, the country will be better for it.

Remarkable? Hardly. I’ve mentioned this before, but can editors demand that reporters retire words like “remarkable” and “extraordinary” from their vocabularies? When some House conservatives were refusing to immediately support President Trump’s “one big beautiful bill,” more than one story called it “remarkable.” The New York Times reported, “It was a remarkable revolt that threatened to upend the party’s goal of pushing the legislation through the House before its Memorial Day recess and sent Republican leaders scrambling to try to put down the uprising.” There was nothing remarkable about it. It’s called negotiating, and nearly everyone soon fell into line. There are reporters who use “remarkable” or “extraordinary” when what they really should say is, “pretty common.”

‘MAGA Republicans Are Already Normal’ — for yourself or for that friend or loved one who can’t fathom Trump

“MAGA Republicans Are Already Normal — And Other Shocking Notions” is a great addition to the library of MAGA Trump supporters, or the perfect gift for non-MAGA friends and loved ones to help them make sense of the 2024 election results. It’s available on Amazon. Buy it here.

The book (actually much thicker than the illustrations above indicate — the hardcover and paperback are each 453 pages) is a compilation of many of the nearly 200 columns I wrote for the Washington Post from 2017 to 2023 (and a handful of columns I wrote about Trump for The (Hillsboro) Times-Gazette from 2015 to 2017). The columns cover a variety of topics, but they particularly focus on Trump’s rise to political prominence and help explain his appeal.

Here’s a link to a website dedicated to the book.

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