Overeducated, Undercapitalized, And Insufferable: The Left’s MVPs

The “working class” isn’t voting for the Democratic Socialists of America. Underpaid, overeducated, and insufferably self-righteous leftists are.

A new report from statistician Nate Silver found that the most reliably Democratic voting bloc in America holds a graduate degree and earns somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. Wouldn’t you know it: our favorite little communists, the card-carrying members of the DSA, are overwhelmingly college-educated (80% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher) yet distinctly unprosperous (45% report household incomes under $60,000).

Oopsie. Turns out spending 785 years in school just to crawl out of the halls of the Intifada Ivies with a master’s in African Art won’t make you boatloads of money. It will, however, make you an aggrieved, uptight, miserable Marxist, whose life’s purpose isn’t reunion with the Lord our Savior, but a tireless personal crusade against procreation, on account of climate change.

Okay, maybe that’s an overgeneralization. But the foundation holds.

The average master’s student casting a ballot for socialism has sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into a degree they’re slowly realizing has no value in the real world, or isn’t needed at all, thanks to our country’s “elite overproduction” problem. They are perpetually, seethingly irate that the high school dropout who knows how to drill for oil has landed a far more valuable profession than they have.

This data demolishes the lie these DSA activists are selling: that they represent the working class, the “little guy.” We heard it ad nauseam from oyster farmer and self-described bro Graham “I’d rape home invaders, but not in a gay way” Platner, running for Senate in Maine, and from Abdul El-Sayed, terror apologist running for Senate in Michigan. Unsurprisingly and despite their valiant efforts, the nepo baby and the millionaire, respectively, flopped with the voters they claimed to champion. Platner performed pitifully among voters without college degrees, and El-Sayed is floundering with black voters.

So who exactly is the working class? Traditionally, the term meant physical labor and no four-year degree: the blue-collar worker, and now, its pastel-hued cousin, the pink-collar worker: nurses, teachers, and clerical staff.

It turns out that this is the demographic least likely to vote Democrat.

Leftist candidates have tried valiantly to stretch the definition of “working class” to fit their own membership rolls: social workers, public sector employees, non-profit staffers. The rest of the DSA’s ranks are filled out by white-collar professionals, career academics, and the unemployed or disabled. Checks out. You can spot the type just by scanning a DSA meeting. These rooms aren’t overflowing with the builders, the innovators, the creators, or the doers. Rather, they more closely resemble a theater-kid-anonymous meeting: the debt-ridden, the disabled, the desperately overdramatic underemployed, or some combination of all three.

They aren’t making a lot of cash, and they are furious at the people who are.

Republican voters are seeing the exact opposite scenario unfold. About 60% of voters with a high school education or less, but whose households earned $60,000 or more, preferred Trump to the Democratic field. And no wonder. Electricians and plumbers now pull a median salary north of $62,000, and the construction industry alone needs roughly 349,000 net new workers in 2026 just to keep up. Wages in the trades are climbing faster than the national average, precisely because nobody wants to do the work anymore. So the guy who skipped the seminar on intersectionality to learn how to wire a breaker box is out here making bank, no student loans attached, while his master’s degree-holding classmate is still waiting for the revolution to cover rent.

Across all the data, one thing rings true. If you’re highly educated yet chronically broke, you’re likely to describe yourself as “very liberal.”

Also, the paler the skin and the more neon the hair, the more likely the “very liberal” self-diagnosis. (That last one I made up, but it sounds right.)

And it all makes a certain grim sense. These are people who exit the ivory towers right around the time their hair starts graying, aged out by years of protesting, pronoun-swapping, and experimenting with every imagined sexuality under the sun. They felt more consequential holding a megaphone and chanting numbingly banal slogans through a cloth mask than they ever will at their actual job. So they leave the private sector (extra credit if they never set foot in it to begin with) and either run for office themselves or raise money for their equally bored friends already working in government.

They’re angry that their matcha costs nine dollars and that it takes an arm and a leg just for a yoga instructor to tell them to “shavasana” 40 times in 50 minutes. They’re angry that the kid they went to high school with owns two houses and has a family of four by 27, because he went into the trades, while they got saddled with gender studies debt. They’re angry at anyone who became successful, unable to fathom why that person isn’t losing sleep over the nonexistent genocide in Gaza or the equally nonexistent genocide of trans people down the block.

It comes down to what these voters are prioritizing. They care about the cost of living and making everything free via socialism because they’re strapped for cash and too lazy to change their own situations. They care about “democracy” because they’ve been told Republicans are eating it alive, even as Democrats keep installing candidates in primaries who never earned a single vote and campaign on abolishing the filibuster and the Senate along with it. They care about healthcare and strangling business with regulation because they have nothing else to do but complain and dismantle the capitalist machine that gave them the medicine, the treatment, and the care they’re currently benefiting from.

High-earning Republicans, meanwhile, generally care about putting food on the table, getting through the workday, and showing up for their community at church, at synagogue, or on the sidelines of their kid’s rec league soccer game. Then they turn on the news and learn the Socialists want to tax more of their paycheck.

This isn’t new. Every revolutionary movement in history has been built by the entitled, educated, and downwardly mobile, who have both the time and the grievance to spare.

The more productive thing would be for every gender studies major in America to shadow an electrician for a week. Nothing cures elite overproduction and the rise of socialism quite like creating something of actual value to society. Because the reality is, capitalism didn’t fail these overly educated, undercapitalized, insufferable pinkos, their major did.