Noam Scheiber

And she's very much of this demographic and supported by this demographic.

We see a huge increase in the number of young college grads who are joining the Democratic Socialists of America, which goes from about 5,000 members in the United States before 2016 to nearly 100,000 members by the end of the decade, a majority of them young, college-educated people.

We see support for socialism really rise among college-educated folks, and especially young college-educated folks, basically doubling support between 2010 and 2020 from about 20% to about 40%.

And of course, last year in New York City...

We saw Zoran Mamdani run away with the mayor's race with a huge burst of support from young college grads.

If you look at college grads under 30 in New York City, 84% of them supported Zoran Mamdani.

And so what we really see is the long tail of all this economic upheaval that college grads have been dealing with for decades come to fruition at this moment and create all this momentum behind candidates and ideas that would have almost been unthinkable before the financial crisis and Great Recession.

There's definitely something to this.

We've seen more women and more people of color get college degrees, and we know historically they tend to be more liberal than white people and men.

But actually, if you only look at white male college grads during this period, you'll also see them move pretty sharply to the left, too.

So it's not just a matter of the changing demographics.

The same profile of person is actually moving to the left.

I think that's a really fair point.

We know from a lot of data, including a recent report by Yale University, that the ideological composition of faculty members has really shifted over the past generation or two.

So in the late 80s, less than half of faculty members identified as liberal.

And a generation later, in the mid-2010s, it was well over half, around 60%.

And if you look at the partisan composition, these days Democrats tend to outnumber Republicans among college faculty members by about 10 to 1, which is an incredibly stark difference.

Yeah, wow.

And so I think there's something going on there.

It's probably not the whole story, though.