A meaningless victory

Rand Paul's Kentucky win is being booted around the dumbisphere and Atlantic correspondent Joshua Green weighs in here with a decent but incomplete analysis. Green is an earnest sort, seems like your typical, bright, well-educated, liberal / progressive journalist. Ironic that this representative of the so-called elitist class, in explaining why Rand Paul signifies nothing, forgot that education is biggest reason why.

In Kentucky's case, lack thereof.

Kentucky is a poorly educated state. Kentucky has the highest ratio of people over 65 who didn't complete high school (42%) and big chunk of that group didn't make it past the ninth grade. Older, uneducated white people are the big, fat core of the Beck/Palin/Limbaugh/Coulter/name-your-dumbass demographic.

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How uneducated is Kentucky?
 
* Dropouts - Kentucky has the 3rd highest ratio of high school dropouts in the adult (18+) population. Only Texas and Mississippi are worse.

* College graduates - Kentucky has the 4th worst ratio of college graduates in the adult (18+) population. Only Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia are worse. (Ratio includes people whose educational attainment stops at an associates degree).

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This is not to say that Kentucky isn't making progress. In the 18-24 age group, Kentucky improves by 10 positions in higher education attainment and by 12 positions in the dropout ratio, vs. the all-adults averages.

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There's a similar picture 25-34 age group, as Kentucky improves by 5 positions in higher education attainment and by 16 positions in the dropout ratio.

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 The 35-44 age group is only slightly better than average for all Kentucky adults.

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Education attainment in older groups of working-age adults falls like a rock: almost 20% of Kentuckians aged 45-64 didn't graduate high school and only 27% have a college degree, vs. (for example) 40% in North Dakota.

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The data show that Kentucky adults are significantly less-educated than the national average. The difference between Kentucky and more developed states, typically in the northeast, is stark.

Therefore, a huge reason why tea bagger "success" will be hard to repeat outside of states where uneducated white people have undue influence is that they will not benefit from a preponderance of credulous adults, primed by lack of education to swallow Faux drivel.

(Analysis by TheRaven, Data source - U.S. Census Bureau)