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**OCTOBER 27, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

There Are More Gaps Than Gender and Race

This year's election results will revive discussion of the gender gap,
not that it's ever gone away. In a

**New York Times**full-page discussion

last Sunday of the coming chasm in gender-based voting results, Michael
Sokolove posited a range of explanations for this enduring and
intensifying phenomenon: Women vote for what they think is good for the
entire society, men for what they think will be good for themselves;
women for policies that enable nurturing, men for policies promoting
competition; and so on. All entirely plausible, if not very surprising.

Sokolove notes in passing that there's also a gap between men with
college degrees and men without. What he

**doesn't**note is that this gap is bigger than the gap between the
sexes. He does tell us that in the latest

**New York Times/**Siena poll, just 42 percent of men backed Joe Biden,
while fully 58 percent of women preferred Empathic Joe-a
16-percentage-point gap. In a late-September

**Washington Post/**ABC News poll, which Sokolove also cites, Trump led
Biden by 8 percentage points among white men with college degrees and 39
percentage points among white men without-a 31-percentage-point gap.

That gap demands its own explanations. It may be a function of the
different media and sources that these classes rely on for their
news-more broadly, of the widening divide between working-class and
upper-middle-class lives. But something more fundamental, troubling, and
remediable, I think, is in play here: the devaluation of
non-professional and non-managerial work. More pointedly, the
devaluation of manual labor and of people who work with their hands.

That's not a new story. From the 18th century through the early 20th
century, craftsmen (they were mainly men) resisted, often fiercely,
their replacement by assembly lines and machines that could be operated
by lesser-skilled labor. In the middle of the last century, by virtue of
their fighting for and winning powerful unions, they at least secured
adequate compensation for working on those lines or in those mills,
compensation which for a time paid a wage that could support not just
the male worker but, if he had one, his family. Now, those unions are
gone, and the jobs that pay a family wage tend to require a college
degree-and a lot of those don't pay a family wage, either.

That tends to produce anger-as well it should. With considerable
prompting from right-wing demagogues, however, that anger-not just in
the U.S. but in most of the postindustrial world-is frequently
misdirected at what many see as a feminized and multiracial culture,
rather than at the financial powers that have made it so much harder to
support their families. Facing daunting challenges to becoming a family
breadwinner, some throw themselves into cultures of hypermasculinity.
Where a hunting rifle once provided a sense of identity, now it takes an
assault rifle.

There's no easy remedy for this, and it's sure not issuing an AK-47
to every growing boy. But revaluing manual labor must be the

**sine qua non** of any real solution. Physicists refining string theory
are all well and good, but when your pipes bust, what you really need is
a plumber.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Sources: Gina Raimondo Being Considered as Biden's Treasury Secretary

The Rhode Island governor would not be a popular selection among
progressives or organized labor. BY DAVID DAYEN

Who Are the Modi Democrats?

Indian Americans lean to the left, while many also support India's
Hindu nationalist prime minister. BY REENA SHAH

GOP Lawmaker Leads Fight to Get His Industry a Government Bailout

Rep. Van Taylor voted against aid for renters and student debtors-but
the real estate mogul is now using his office to pressure the government
to give his commercial real estate industry a government bailout. BY
CHRISTOF RINDLISBACHER

Unsanitized, Election Edition: Barrett Confirmation Reinforces That
McConnell Is Looking Past This Election

Or maybe he's looking to how a 6-3 Court can steal it. This is The
Election 2020 Daily Report for October 27, 2020. BY DAVID DAYEN

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