[Guest post by DRJ]

I think Michael Barone is the best analyst of demographic voting issues today. His article on the demographic breakdown in the Obama-Clinton voting is fascinating and instructive:

“But looking at these electoral data suggests to me that there’s another tribal divide going on here, one that separates voters more profoundly than even race (well, maybe not more profoundly than race in Mississippi but in other states). That’s the divide between academics and Jacksonians. In state after state, we have seen Obama do extraordinarily well in academic and state capital enclaves. In state after state, we have seen Clinton do extraordinarily well in enclaves dominated by Jacksonians.

Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war. Economically, defense spending competes for the public-sector dollars that academics and public employees think are rightfully their own. More important, I think, warriors are competitors for the honor that academics and public employees think rightfully belongs to them. Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, “If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you.” And he (or she) means it.”

The analysis is lengthy and I’ve only included one part of it here. Ultimately, Barone compares Obama to Adlai Stevenson because “[l]ike Stevenson, he speaks fluently and often eloquently but does not exude a sense of command. He is an interlocutor, not a fighter.” Barone views Clinton as a fighter and not a quitter, qualities that appeal to Jacksonians.

This is reminiscent of Walter Russell Mead‘s excellent analysis of the philosophy and motivations of Americans. Thanks to denbeste.nu for making one of Mead’s articles available online.

UPDATE 4/5/2008: Barone has refined and summarized his theory in this article.

— DRJ