Much has been made about how Donald Trump has redefined American politics along class lines, with white, working-class voters embracing Republicans, and educated voters drifting toward Democrats. But that description doesn’t fully convey just how extreme the stratification has become. In 2020, according to exit polls, Trump won white voters with high school diplomas or less by 37%, and white voters with “some college” by 30%. As white voters climb the education curve, those numbers bend sharply toward the Democrats. According to an analysis of exit polls provided by Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution, President-Elect Joe Biden won white voters with advanced degrees by 18%—a strikingly high margin. It is an extraordinary difference in political outlook between those at the bottom of the education pyramid and those at the top. If you factor in Black and Latino voters, Biden won all voters with bachelor’s degrees by 4% and those with advanced degrees by 25%. There are many predictors of voter behavior in this country, but where you sit on the education curve is now one of the strongest.
The Democratic Party, then, is increasingly the party of educated voters—a disquieting trend for many Democrats, who have historically seen themselves as protectors of the working class. Some attribute the loss of the working-class vote to a combination of racism, ignorance, and Trump’s social media sorcery, and there’s likely a measure of truth to that. But it’s also likely due to a growing divergence of priorities and values between those voters and the Democratic Party. For evidence, look no further than a Morning Consult/Politico poll from earlier this month on priorities for the Biden administration and Congress. The survey described 25 different initiatives and asked respondents to rate them as top priorities, important but lesser, not too important, or should not be done. Not surprisingly, there were a number of policy ideas—rejoining the World Health Organization and climate change legislation, for example—that were vastly more important to educated respondents. Even more revealing: For every one of the 25 priorities, the most educated group thought the initiative was more important than those without a college degree. Curtailing the budget deficit, building a wall on the Mexican border, regulating tech companies, you name it, more educated respondents were more enthusiastic about government action. Some of the categories were close, but it all hints at a strong class divide wherein educated elites see government as a source of solutions, and the working class does not—and no amount of policy briefs will close this gulf.
In theory, it’s a divide that Democrats can live with, as long as it’s limited to white voters. Adults with graduate degrees are a large and growing part of the population. About 13% of U.S. adults have graduate degrees (up from about 8% in 2000)—roughly equal in size to Black adults and only slightly smaller than Latinos, and as a voting group, likely larger than both. That group will only continue to grow as the existence of a large pool of workers with graduate degrees devalues bachelor’s degrees to such an extent that more people seek higher education just to stay competitive in the job market. A coalition of educated, Black, and Latino voters, is one Democrats are counting on to anchor the party. As long as they can count on race trumping class with Black and Latino voters, they will be in good shape for decades to come. So far, the relationship between the Democratic Party and working-class Black and Latino voters has been remarkably durable, with Democrats consistently able to pull down roughly two thirds of the Latino vote and 80% or more of the Black vote.
Still, there’s reason to question whether those bonds are unbreakable, especially for Latino voters. Democrats’ migration toward educated elites naturally clashes with the low level of trust that both Black and Latino voting blocs have for government and the establishment. A Pew Research survey last year found that there is a high incidence of Hispanic “low trusters” in government—more than among the working class, more than among those with a lower income, and about equal to the young. For Hispanic low trusters, politics is seen as a “white man’s game,” as Geraldo Cadava, a professor at Northwestern University and author of The Hispanic Republican, put it to me, and Democrats and Republicans are often viewed with similar mistrust.
It’s data like this, along with the modest electoral gains made by Trump this year with both Latino and Black voters, that suggest to some Republicans that they can tack from being a white working-class party to an all-inclusive working-class party, as Senator Marco Rubio tweeted after the election: “Florida & the Rio Grande Valley showed the future of the GOP. A party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working Americans.” But that path won’t be an easy one. Rob Griffin, the research director of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, scoffed at the notion that Republicans can “suddenly claim that mantle in a world where the Democratic Party is obviously…going to be more racially diverse.” It will be hard for Republicans to take advantage of a mistrust borne in part of their own race-baiting. Cadava quoted to me a conversation with a leading Latino Republican who told him, “if Trump would just keep his fucking mouth shut, he would be the most popular president in American history.” There’s no evidence that Trump can keep his mouth shut, but it’s possible that a subsequent Republican leader might.
Democrats can take comfort in these challenges, but they can’t take the support of working-class Latino or Black voters for granted, as they may have done during the 2020 cycle. And in fact, Biden, with all his fondness for his Scranton, Pennsylvania, roots, may be playing the wrong game. The focus on reengaging on the world stage, the recruitment of John Kerry as special presidential envoy for climate change, and the appointment of a senior team comfortable in the corridors of power are undoubtedly reassuring to more educated voters seeking normalcy and competency after the Trump years. But these steps may be out of tune with a working class suspicious of elites and focused on bread-and-butter issues, or at least that’s what Republicans seem to think: Rubio tweeted that Biden’s Cabinet picks “went to Ivy League schools, have strong résumés, [and] attend all the right conferences,” and Missouri senator Josh Hawley (he of Stanford University and Yale Law School) pointed out that an appointee has “no sense of what working Americans want or need.” This will be their goal for the next four years: to make class, not race, the political divider of our times.
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