[Watch Whole Hog Politics live: Join us today at 9 a.m. EST at TheHill.com as Chris Stirewalt and host Bill Sammon break down this week's political news and answer questions from a live online audience.]
Yes, America is divided along lines of gender, ethnicity, faith (or absence thereof) and so much more. But education is the divide that slices through the tissue and into the sinew of the republic.
In 1980, nearly three-quarters of voters nationally were white Americans without college degrees. In 2024, it was about 40 percent. Greater cultural diversity explains some of that, but the key element that changed our politics so much wasn't about ethnic identity but rather education.
In 1980, a college degree was far less essential as a stepping stone to success and entry to the managerial class. Only about 17 percent of all adults older than 25 back then had a bachelor's degree or more. Now, a four-year degree is the ante price even for many kinds of administrative jobs. Accordingly, about 40 percent of adults now have college diplomas, a share that will continue its climb as those baby boom Americans who were new in the less credentialist job market of 50 years ago pass away — and out of the demographic tables — in large numbers over the coming 15 years or so.
What changed our politics, though, wasn't so much that more people were going to college, but rather that those who did and those who did not started voting very differently … the white ones, anyway.
According to the University of Virginia Center for Politics analysis, Black voters from 1980 to 2020 were not only consistent in their preference for Democrats, but also there was no significant difference between Black voters with or without college degrees.
Over the same period, white voters without college degrees went from narrowly favoring Democrats (2.2 points in the 1980s) to overwhelmingly favoring Republicans in the 2010s (23.7 points). College-educated white voters went on exactly the opposite trip, going from solidly Republican (12.2 points) to kind of Democratic (2.5 points). What the heck happened there?
Some caveats are in order.
First, the "college degree required" generations are younger and will therefore tend to skew more Democratic. Part of this remarkable divergence is just another way to look at the traditional partisan divides between the young and the old. Presumably, when the college boom has worked its way through another generation or two, those differences will flatten out.
That leads to the second proviso: It's not so much that college made white Americans more Democratic, but that the distribution of college graduates tilts toward younger voters, which favors Democrats — not always, not everywhere and not to the same degree in every election, but generally.
And that brings us to the third point of caution: Having a college degree is strongly correlated to earning power but is by no means determinative of career success. Some of the richest people I know never finished college. But because of the dramatic differences in the cost of living in various parts of the country, income data ends up not being very useful in examining socioeconomic questions. What $150,000 a year buys in Delbarton, W.Va., is very different from what it will do in Delaplane, Va. Because of that high correlation to vocational achievement regardless of geography, though, the question of college vs. noncollege is a simple, if imperfect, way to sort the electorate into blue-collar and white-collar categories.
Many Republicans have exulted in this shift, relishing the idea, after being stereotyped as the party of the rich for decades, of being a working-class party. Lord knows Democrats enjoyed that status in their 150 years of identifying as the party of "farmers, mechanics, and laborers." We can understand a great deal of the Trump administration's attacks on higher education, big companies, banks and other elite institutions not so much as a "war on woke" but as old-fashioned class warfare in a mode very familiar to Democrats from former President Jackson to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Switching horses — or electoral coalitions — in midstream is always tricky, though. And what makes the current change in mounts so hard for Republicans is that they are making the move just as the long-term trend toward greater wealth and educational attainment has the percentage of blue-collar voters shrinking, not growing as it did for most of the Democrats' long reign as the party of the working class. The thing about the "common man" is that he's not so common anymore. We might think of the recent Republican embrace of central economic planning, corporate takeovers and import taxes as efforts to please their existing lower-income voters, yes, but also to make more of them.
The GOP's short-term solution to a shrinking pool of blue-collar white voters, though, has just been to dive deeper into it.
In each of President Trump's three presidential contests, a majority of his overall support came from white voters without college degrees. That would be an alarming degree of dependency on one shrinking demographic group, unless … you could score increasingly high shares of those voters.
The last time Republicans won the national popular vote before 2024 was in 2004. That year, white working-class voters split about evenly, with a slight edge for then-President George W. Bush. He got a little more than half of a group that was back then a little more than half of the electorate itself.
Twenty years later, the white working class made up about 40 percent of the electorate, but Trump won 66 percent of them. Like a diver on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, Republicans are going from increasing heights into a smaller and smaller pool. Which is fine, as long as you hit the target.
Which is why, if you are a Republican, you might want to let your eyes drift through the crosstabs of the most recent survey from Marist College's excellent polling unit. Trump's approval rating among whites without college degrees — the same voters that went for Trump by a 2-to-1 ratio in 2024 — is 46 percent. Trump is at 43 percent with these voters on his handling of the economy, including an abysmal 38 percent among the women of that group. These voters don't even like the tariffs that are supposed to be a boon to them: 35 percent approve of Trump on the import taxes.
On how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is conducting its operations? The white working class clocks in at 40 percent approval. On foreign policy generally, it's 43 percent. On Greenland, it's 13 percent.
Woof.
None of that is to say that Democrats are poised to make a massive breakthrough with working-class voters in November. In fact, this kind of disaffection with working-class white voters suggests that many of them will sit out the midterms altogether, shrinking the target for those high-diving Republicans even further.
[Programming alert: Watch The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt Be sure to catch us on NewsNation at 10 a.m. EST / 9 a.m. CST or your local CW station.]
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.