Clinton, Obama, and the Education Gap

Garance Franke-Ruta at Tapped notes that Hillary Clinton is mopping the floor with Barack Obama when it comes to voters with only a high school degree or some college, due to a combination of her appeal to the middle class in her Stump speech and Obama's lower name recognition among those voters.

I'm not a huge fan of this kind of statistic, particularly as someone who covers young people in politics. There's really two reasons for that. First, politics is a numbers game, and % of a certain demographic isn't the vital number. It's what that % = in terms of voting age population that really matters, as well as their location. These statistics are pretty meaningless unless you assign them to specific populations within Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

Garance notes that Hillary is brining new woman into the process who lack college degrees. Awesome, but just how many? Likewise, Obama is bringing new college educated folks into the process as well as college-age and high school-aged supporters. Again, what does that mean for the numbers game? None of the reporting I've seen digs deep enough to tell us.

This makes me somewhat frustrated, and wishing I had access to Stata to run through the census data (or more time to sift it by hand).

The second reason I'm not a fan is that high school, some college, and all college are meaningless distinctions among 17-21 year olds. How do you categorize a high schooler who plans to go to college and earn a degree? What about someone who is attending college - are they "some college" or are they a degree earner? We're talking about social stratifications here based on education, but there isn't some magical shift once a person gets their hands on a sheepskin. The lines are much blurrier for those who are in the process of getting an education.

Via historical comparison, Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times and Gallup both offer one interesting take on this situation. In the last 20 years, numerous primary challengers in the Democratic Party have made an appeal to the more educated base of the Democratic Party - notably Howard Dean (2004), Bill Bradley (2000) and Gary Hart (1988). None of those candidates found the base to be large enough to carry them over the top. Will Obama follow in their footsteps, or is he truly brining in enough new people in the early primary states to take him over the top? Considering that participation in the Iowa Caucus by young voters quadrupled (pdf) between 2000 and 2004, it is certainly possible.