27 February 2020

FiveThirtyEight: What Defines The Sanders Coalition?

Younger Democrats (those under 45) are more likely to be very liberal than older Democrats,3 and Sanders is very popular where these two groups overlap. But very liberal Democrats under 45 make up a small bloc of the electorate (10 percent of the exit poll sample in New Hampshire and 16 percent in both Iowa and Nevada).

But he’s also popular, though not quite so overwhelmingly, with the nonoverlapping parts of these two groups. The entrance and exit polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada showed the Vermont senator either leading or tied at the top among voters under 45 who identify as somewhat liberal or moderate, and in New Hampshire and Nevada, he led with very liberal voters who are over age 45. (In Iowa, he was second only to Warren with older, very liberal voters.4 So Sanders’s coalition is not solely age-based or solely ideological; being either young or very liberal makes you likelier to support Sanders, even if you’re not both. [...]

Still, if we had to say what most defines Sanders’s supporters, we would say age. The left-leaning polling firm Data for Progress, in a survey released shortly before the Nevada caucuses that was fairly close to the final results, found that Sanders was winning 66 percent of somewhat liberal respondents under 45, compared to 38 percent of those who are very liberal and over 45. That suggests that younger voters are Sanders’s strongest demographic, even more so than those who are very liberal.[...]

In Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, Sanders was more popular with voters without college degrees than voters with degrees. He was the clear leader among voters without degrees in all three states, but Nevada was the only state where he was well ahead among college graduates. And those two dynamics — Sanders being more popular with non-college-educated voters than college graduates and leading the field among those without degrees — generally also show up in national surveys and polls of upcoming states. In terms of raw numbers, there are probably more Sanders supporters without degrees than Sanders supporters who identify as very liberal, since the former is simply a much larger group. (About half of the voters in the three states that have voted so far didn’t have college degrees, for example, but only 20 to 30 percent of voters in those states identified as very liberal.)

26 February 2020

Stephen Fry's 7 Deadly Sins: Wrath

Mister ANGRY has been unleashed from his rage cage. Let’s drink together some of the wine from his grapes of wrath. Furious to know more?

The Guardian Today in Focus: India, Modi and the rise of Hindu nationalism

Narendra Modi has been grappling with continuing domestic unrest since his Hindu nationalist BJP government passed the CAA in December, which grants citizenship for refugees of every major south Asian religion except Muslims. In conjunction with a planned national register of citizens, it is feared the law will make India’s Muslim community aliens in their own country and undermine the secular foundations of the country by making religion the basis of citizenship.

BBC: American parenting styles sweep Europe

It’s generally acknowledged that raising a child has geographic variations. In 2009, for example, a study by an international group of academics looked at the way parents in different countries talked about the traits they wanted their children to have. The differences were fascinating. Dutch parents, for example, focused on the Three Rs: rust, reinheid and regelmaat (rest, cleanliness and routine). Italian parents preferred their children to be even-tempered, well-balanced and “simpatico”. American parents, meanwhile, were more likely to want their child to be “intelligent” or “cognitively advanced”. [...]

“[Intensive parenting] is a type of parenting that requires a significant amount of time and money,” says Patrick Ishizuka, a sociology professor at Cornell University who studies intensive parenting. It includes scheduling children for multiple extracurricular activities, as well as advocating for their needs and talents in communications with schools and other institutions. And it’s not limited to a small subset of parents. “I would describe it as the dominant cultural model of parenting in the US right now,” says Ishizuka. [...]

He believes that the rise in inequality, including in Europe, makes parents feel they need to help drive their children’s education, a view shared by Matthias Doepke, a researcher living in the US and co-author of the book Love, Money and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids. “If inequality is very high, that means from the parents’ perspective, it’s becoming very important for the kids not to be left behind. And so parents will assume a parenting style that is more intense and that is more success-oriented,” Doepke explains.

TLDR News: Bernie Wins Nevada: What That Means for the 2020 Race

At the weekend Senator Bernie Sanders won his third Primary of the 2020 process in Nevada. In this video, we discuss the winners and losers in Nevada as well as the impact this will have on the rest of the contest.