Opponents often dismiss Obama supporters as being as green as their candidate, silly young things whipped into a frenzy by the freshman senator’s rock concert rallies and soaring wordplay. Get them talking about real policy issues, it is said, and they fold, clueless.
But then along came Derrick Ashong. Standing outside a Clinton-Obama debate in Los Angeles in early February, the 32-year-old Ashong provided the kind of free advertising every candidate dreams of. No stranger to public speaking, Ashong took on a cynical YouTube documentarian’s aggressive man-on-the-street interview and knocked it out of the park with (gasp!) informed, thoughtful, critically-minded responses. Now, bolstered by shout-outs from the Economist, The Atlantic, and, two days ago, a full-out article from the New York Times, the clip and Ashong’s follow-up video have together racked up well over a million views:
The broad appeal of wonkish discussions aside, I think it’s fair to say that Ashong’s rise to cyberfame has been so meteoric precisely because it was unexpected that anyone holding a “Change We Can Believe In” sign would be able to sustain a discussion about anything besides, well, change they believe in. All of which got me thinking: Is there any merit to the argument? Are any one candidate’s supporters more or less informed than another’s?
Maybe. Pollsters have long collected information about voters’ education levels, but not their responses to “knowledge questions” about current events and policies as they did, for example, with this study about news consumers last year. Data exists to show that support for Hillary Clinton tends to be stronger among less-educated Democrats, while Barack Obama’s numbers trend in the opposite direction. Republicans tend on average to be slightly more knowledgeable than Democrats, but they pull support from voters in the mid-range of educational levels, while Democrats draw from both the most and least highly educated demographics. And as one analyst at Pew speculated, knowledge survey numbers are likely to be further complicated by Obama supporters’ “peculiar demographic profile,” since Obama tends to appeal to both the very young and the post-grad school crowd. Folks at the Annenberg Public Policy Center say they will likely come out with a study in the next few weeks, so stay tuned for updates.
