Democrats next hot primary race deepens the partys stark fractures

What did the country ever do to white college graduates to make them feel so disaffected from its economic and political system?The wave of socialist victories in Democratic Party primaries is being driven by well-educated white voters who are more extreme than the rest of the Democratic coalition. The latest evidence is a new poll in the closely watched Democratic primary for a Senate seat in Michigan.The AOC-endorsed, Israel-hating insurgent, Abdul El-Sayed, has had momentum, but is now narrowly trailing the establishment candidate, Haley Stevens.According to a Detroit News survey, Stevens is ahead by about seven percentage points, with demographic advantages that are very telling. Stevens, a goofy white lady, leads El-Sayed by a 3-to-1 margin among black voters.On the other hand, El-Sayed, a person of color fully vested in the left’s Third Worldist agenda, leads among white voters, 51% to 39%. Stevens, a career apparatchik and politician, leads among non-college-educated voters, 56%-34% — whereas El-Sayed, who has been endorsed by the Working Families Party, is ahead with college-educated voters, 48%-41%.The respective strengths of the two candidates run against the grain of what you might expect in a race between a conventional Democrat and a radical, yet accord with what we’ve seen in campaign after campaign. Socialists may imagine themselves the champions of people of color and of workers, but their movement is, by and large, most attractive to Caucasian associate professors of sociology who think they haven’t achieved the station in life that they deserve.It’s less a proletarian phenomenon than a project of frustrated PhD candidates and medium-grade professionals. Because many socialist candidates have immigrant backgrounds, it can be tempting to consider the movement as fundamentally a function of immigration, when that’s not true. A 2021 survey of DSA members found that they were disproportionately white, at 85%, and disproportionately h...