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Comment by pannSun | Hacker News Reader

> The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines. [..] Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican.

This is overstating it. Among white voters, college graduates preferred not just Republicans, but Trump, by a 4% margin (and by 14% in 2012) [1]. The sorting along racial lines seems the more obvious one.

Given things such as the (attempted) explicitly racially discriminatory prioritizing of funding by the Biden administration [2], can we really be surprised?

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trum...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/us/politics/biden-debt-re...

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The fact that, 150+ years after 1868, a reputable source can bin by {Black, Hispanic, White} and get a distinct signal is mind-boggling. Does anyone ever bothering segmenting voters by {Blonde, Brunette, Ginger}? Or talk about how it's only natural that the left-hander vote skews for a given candidate?

(I was always offended, as a child, by all the forms with an entry for "race"; I've been away for long enough that I had forgotten all about it before this thread)

As european citizen, you americans are obsessed with race thing. I struggle to imagine european policy research that segregates people by skin colour or whatever else.

> the fact that, 150+ years after 1868, a reputable source is can bin by {Black, Hispanic, White} and get a distinct signal is mind-boggling

Is it really? Compared to how long people have been competing along tribal lines, 150 years is less than negligible.

For roughly 6'000 years before the 1800s, people didn't travel faster than ~80 km/h, but now we routinely[0] do so.

(yes, there is tribalism here too —Sneetches will be Sneetches— but the tribalism is at least along slightly more subtle lines than melanin content)

[0] on occasion a very few of us manage 40'000 km/h. Past Performance Is Not Indicative Of Future Results

It's easy to say "I don't see race", but when everyone else does you're just sticking your head in the sand. People have never been discriminated by hair color in this country.

What happened in 1868?

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/amendment-14/

Among other changes, the Original Constitutional 3/5 of a person language got deprecated.

It starts by talking about "persons", but the right to vote was still reserved for "male inhabitants". Women's suffrage (19A) was a half century in the future, and at the point I emigrated from the Old Country, the ERA still had not been ratified. Haven't checked to see if you all have ratified it since.

Edit: I suspect the reason the Civil Rights Movement was such a big deal in the 1960s is that folks looked around and said to themselves "100 years of Reconstruction, and we're still lynching?"

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