The Numbers Finally Caught Up to the Covetous Left

See, I Told You So: The Numbers Finally Caught Up to the Covetous Left
Erick-Woods Erickson
Jul 22, 2026

Two columns I wrote you recently deserve a reunion, and a man named Nate Silver just RSVP’d.

Yesterday, I told you that socialism is built on covetousness. Not injustice, not compassion, not some noble hunger for fairness — covetousness. The oldest sin in the catalog, the one God thought serious enough to spend a whole commandment on. Socialism takes that forbidden itch, dresses it up in the language of justice, and calls it a movement.

A few weeks before that, I told you the socialist and communist elite rising in this country are not the wretched of the earth. They are not the poor, the hungry, the forgotten. They are status-anxious people trying to protect a rank they believe belongs to them — and the way they protect it is by convincing everybody else that they are victims of the successful.

I got grief for both pieces. “Anecdote is not data, Erick,” a few of you wrote, throwing my own line back in my face. Fair enough — I taught you that line, and I meant it. So let’s talk about data.

It comes not from some fever-swamp think tank and not from me. It comes from Nate Silver — the numbers man of the center-left, a fellow with no earthly reason to do conservatives any favors. In his July 21 newsletter, “The DSA sweet spot: highly educated, downwardly mobile,” Silver ran more than 400,000 voters through the Cooperative Election Study and found the beating heart of the Democratic Socialists of America. And my friends, it is not who they tell you it is.

The single most Democratic voting bloc in America is not the poor. It is people with postgraduate degrees earning between thirty and sixty thousand dollars a year. Read that twice. In the DSA’s own 2021 membership survey, 80 percent of members over 25 held a bachelor’s degree, but 45 percent had household incomes under $60,000. Silver notes that only about 19 percent of all degree-holders in America live under that income line — the DSA runs at roughly double the national rate. Their common professions? Teachers, non-profit staffers, social workers, public-sector employees. And 85 percent of them are white.

These are not the poor. These are the downwardly mobile. And the difference between those two things is the entire ballgame.

Silver reaches for Peter Turchin’s phrase — “elite overproduction.” We have minted more prestige degrees than we have prestige jobs to hand them. So you get a generation who did what they were told, colored inside the lines, took out the loans, sat through the seminar on the semiotics of oppression, and then waited for the salary and status that were supposed to come with the diploma. The salary never showed up. They carry the debt and the disappointment together. Silver, in his own understated way, says they are “genuinely upset about their station in life.” His own case study, the Maine candidate Graham Platner, he describes as “downwardly mobile” from a “fairly privileged background.” That, right there, is the tell.

Now watch how neatly this stitches my two columns together.

Covetousness first. These are not people who lack. These are people who were promised more and are furious it didn’t arrive. That is envy in a cap and gown. And print this on a billboard: Silver’s data show the most Republican voters in the country are high-earners who never went to college. The contractor. The small-business owner. The plumber who owns three trucks and coaches Little League. The man who skipped the master’s degree, went and built something with his hands, and is now doing better than the person who resents him for it.

Then victimhood. To protect a status the paycheck won’t justify, you recast yourself as a victim — of corrupt elites, of billionaires, of “successful people.” And you recruit others into the same story. Look at what these voters actually prioritize. Not jobs. Not health care. Silver’s numbers show them leading with the culture war — “Free Palestine,” the trans agenda, the environment. Among grad-degree earners in that $30–60K band, 21 percent call themselves “very liberal,” about twice the national average. The grievance isn’t really about the rent. The grievance is about the gap between who they were told they’d be and who they turned out to be.

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