The Monkey Cage

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

So says Ross Douthat in the NY Times. I have no idea whether Sarah Palin is a “great success story.” I guess getting elected governor and being nominated for the vice-presidency counts as success, although some might say it’s how you do those jobs rather than whether you simply hold them. And I’ll leave it to political theorists to parse Douthat’s contrast between meritocracy and democracy, and whether or how Obama and Palin somehow embody those ideals. (A lot of Obama’s story seems to me a “democratic” story, but that’s a separate post.)

Instead, I’ll just do the boring old social science thing and note how badly Douthat misuses polling data. Douthat wants to claim that Palin’s appeal is class-based. To back that up, he cites how favorably she is viewed among Americans without a college education. His view of that figure (48%) is a little opaque. I read him as saying something like, “It’s noteworthy that slightly more Americans have a positive impression of Palin than have a negative impression, and those positive impressions seem even more prevalent among Americans without a college degree.”

So here’s my point. If you want to make the argument that Palin’s support is based on class, and that “lower class” people have a more favorable view of her, it really really helps if people of different class backgrounds have different opinions of her.

And they really really don’t. Douthat cites these Pew data, but fails to tell you how people with some college or a college degree view her. It turns out that there are extraordinarily small differences based on education background. Here’s a graph:

That 7-point gap between the views of the college educated and the high school-educated implies a tiny class cleavage at best. Douthat’s rendering of Palin is not reflected in how the public sees her.