This drawing explains a surprising amount about your political views

The link between modern art and modern politics.

Featured on vox.com

Simple polling reveals Americans’ views of President Donald Trump are split by variables like race, ethnicity, age, and increasingly by whether or not you earned a college degree.

Some other more unusual questions also reveal strong correlations, and those correlations may do more to reveal what’s really going on than basic demographic questions.

Consider, for example, Sam Gilliam’s 1980 drawing “Coffee Thyme.” Data for Progress, a progressive think tank, partnered with YouGov Blue in a recent poll that showed this image (without any further identifying information) to respondents and asked them whether or not they consider it art.

If it looks like art to you, then odds are you disapprove of Trump’s job performance. If it doesn’t, then odds are you like him.

The Coffee Thyme Gap is actually larger than the college degree gap, which is one of the biggest and most widely discussed predictors of Trump support. And there’s reason to believe the bachelor’s degree serves as an imperfect proxy for underlying psychological attributes that are better captured by asking about art.

The numbers

Approval of Trump is, of course, correlated more tightly with partisanship than with any demographic variable. But Republicans who think “Coffee Thyme” is art are somewhat less likely than skeptics to approve of Trump, and among independents there is a very noticeable Coffee Thyme Gap.

That corresponds to a significant gap in overall approval that’s bigger than the education divide. Among people who think “Coffee Thyme” is art, Trump approval is at 36 percent, whereas among college graduates he’s at 45 percent.

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