Just curious. The left claim that the uneducated people voted Trump into office. I say there are more uneducated on the left than there are on the right.
I don't know about quantity, but when it comes to quality the Left is hands down more educated. Generally, what I have found is that Republicans have average minds. While Liberals tend to occupy the two extremes. They have some of the least educated voters, but also the most educated voters. When you look at exit polling for most of the last few presidential elections Democrats did very well among the poorly educated. People with maybe a high school diploma at best. Republicans did very well with the moderately educated. People with some college up to a bachelors degree, but then Democrats once again dominated among the most highly educated. People with masters degrees, PhDs, and other upper graduate degrees.
The reason I think is that it has a lot to do with attention span. There are a lot of bad arguments for liberalism. Things like, you have to feed the poor, you have to heal the sick, war is bad... They're nothing more than simplistic appeals to emotion. Then there are slightly better arguments for conservatism that can easily defeat those arguments. But then there's a whole other level of liberal argumentation that can easily blow away those conservative arguments.
When you look at the forms of media that conservatives tend to do well on its things like cable news and talk radio. Liberals tend to do better in print media like newspapers and online. I think the reason is that in a 10-minute tv or radio segment there's really only time to analyze and understand the simple liberal argument and the only moderately better Republican argument.
The better liberal argument is more complex and difficult to understand. An opinion piece in a newspaper or a blog post online can more effectively detail the full argument in its entirety, but when you're watching cable news, and you've got pundits shouting over each other it's hard to get through it and help the audience understand it at a higher level.
I think another aspect of it is work requirements.
The average minds of Republicans can achieve success in life, but it's generally more difficult. They have to work harder to achieve the same level of success that those of us with higher levels of intelligence can achieve quite easily. The result is that they have less sympathy for those who are struggling and they are more belligerent about keeping everything they think they earned. Whereas those of us who have had success come to us a bit more easily recognize the role that talent, opportunity, and privilege play into success and are therefore more likely to feel bad for those who aren't able to achieve it so easily.
I've noticed a somewhat common theme when it comes to success. Those of us that are truly on the top tend to have more sympathy for those who are below, but those who are in the middle or getting close to the top are still a bit insecure and will stop at nothing to move higher even if they have to step on those below.
The analogy I like to make is that of Superman. Average people want to project an image of themselves to the world that makes them look like they are Superman, but Superman wants to project an image of himself to the world that makes him look like Clark Kent a bumbling nerdy reporter that you wouldn't think twice about.
Or to put it another way, imagine a round robin basketball tournament featuring the best high school girl in the country, a men's college freshmen, and Lebron James. The college guy knows he should beat the girl, but he's scared that if he doesn't try as hard as possible she could somehow beat him, and he'd get embarassed for losing to a girl. But Lebron knows he can easily dominate both players so he's more likely to take it easy and allow them to get a few close looks at the basket on him. He might let the girl get to 9 points before he scores his 11th to win, and he might let the guy get to 7 points before he scores his 11th.
