When Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee back in July, polling indicated that she was quickly able to rebuild strength among core party groups such as younger, Hispanic and Black voters. One constituency that had never been in much doubt, even while the weakened President Biden remained in the race, was voters with college degrees.
Graduation from a four-year college has emerged as the key dividing line separating Democratic-trending from Republican-trending white Americans. White citizens with no education beyond high school were once among the most strongly Democratic groups of voters but began shifting away from the party after the election of George W. Bush in 2000. White voters with bachelor’s degrees, conversely, once leaned strongly Republican but began to move in a Democratic direction after 2004.
Without much warning, the 21st century has brought a fundamental transformation of the relationship between education and politics. Like other rich nations, the United States has been transformed by an increasingly educated sector of influential elites who endorse culturally progressive values and prioritize social causes over economic interests. And, as in other democracies, the growing power of white-collar professionals has provoked a populist backlash among less educated and older voters.
Becoming the party of the professional class has granted Democrats a number of advantages. They have been able to erase the GOP’s traditional advantages in fundraising while growing more internally unified, with few dissenting rural or Southern voices left in power. Democrats now hold advantages in lower-turnout,
off-cycle elections, which is tied directly to higher participation rates among the most educated voters. And the younger generations who represent the future American electorate and leadership class are especially likely to espouse progressive beliefs on issues of social identity and other prominent subjects of cultural debate.
But Democrats face new challenges as well. The party’s traditional reputation as the champion of the common man and woman is swiftly fading as it becomes popularly identified with the educationally advantaged and intellectually minded. Democrats have been able to survive heavy erosion among the white, non-college population while still competing effectively for the presidency and Congress, but similar trends among Hispanic or African American voters, which are already evident, would present a more formidable barrier to national victory.
After nearly every major electoral defeat, critics accuse Democrats of having lost touch with the cultural values of white heartland America. The Democratic Party has contained a conspicuously intellectual faction since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain trust” of academic experts helped him develop New Deal policies in the 1930s. But until very recently, most voters with above-average incomes and college-level educational attainment dependably supported the Republican Party. In every election between 1948 and 2004, the most popular positive attribute mentioned by respondents in open-ended questions about the Democratic Party was its status as the party of the working class or the middle class; the most common negative characteristic attributed to the Republicans during the same period was that they were the party of big business or the upper class.
Over the past 20 years, however, the Democrats have become the home of highly educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees. Whites without diplomas continue to provide most of the votes received by national Republican candidates even as they no longer constitute a majority of the overall electorate. The GOP faces a strong incentive to oppose leftward cultural trends accepted by most college-educated Americans but resisted by its primary electoral base of older, white, Christian, socially traditionalist voters residing outside major metro-politan areas. The Republican Party, along with the conservative movement with which it is aligned, now serves as the voice of populist backlash to the authority of professional experts and cultural progressives, looking back nostalgically to a simpler era when a different cast of leaders held power and a different set of values and qualities were socially rewarded.
Before the 1980s, whites without college degrees were consistently more likely to identify as Democrats, the self-styled party of the working class. Democratic identification within this group declined in 1984 and 1988, with the popular presidency of Ronald Reagan. By 2016, non-college whites sharply increased their collective affinity for the Republican Party, with more than 60 percent identifying with or leaning toward the GOP for the first time in the era of modern survey research. College-educated whites lurched in the opposite direction, with Democratic identifiers and leaners beginning to outnumber Republicans among this group in 2016.
Each party has thus lost substantial popularity within an important voting bloc that once served as a major element of its popular base, making both sides potentially vulnerable in an age of consistently close elections. By 2020, college-educated white voters had come to prefer the Democratic Party over the GOP by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent, while non-college white voters identified with the Republicans by a lopsided 2-to-1 ratio (67 percent to 33 percent).
Both major parties have been reshaped by a society in transition. Democrats have become the party of metropolitan professionals, Republicans the champions of the white working class.
Educational attainment is on a steady long-term increase across the United States. Each year, more people are staying in school longer and earning advanced degrees. In 1970, only 11 percent of Americans over the age of 24 had graduated from a four-year college and only 55 percent had even completed high school. The proportion of adult Americans with a college degree more than tripled over the succeeding half-century, reaching 38 percent by 2022.
There are now many more well-educated Americans than ever before in history, and most citizens now accrue at least some college-level experience.
The sheer magnitude of demographic change is striking. Until recently, neither political party could hope to compete for national power without winning a significant proportion of states with electorates dominated by non-college whites. In 1992, whites without a four-year college degree formed a majority of residents in 45 states. By 2020, however, the progression of racial diversification and increased educational achievement had left a notable imprint on the national map. Non-college whites retained an overall majority in just 25 states and represented less than 40 percent of the population in 16 states, plus the District of Columbia.
Unsurprisingly, the states where the share of non-college whites has dropped well below a majority of the adult population have collectively moved toward the Democratic Party over time, while the states where these voters still dominate the electorate have become increasingly Republican. In the 16 states, plus D.C., where non-college whites now represent less than 40 percent of the adult population, the Democratic share of the presidential vote consistently exceeded 55 percent in each of the elections between 2008 and 2020.
Still, the share of adults with at least four years of higher education remains well short of a majority. Democrats have won the popular vote for the presidency in seven of the last eight elections; however, Republicans carried the Electoral College in three of those races and have a structural advantage in the Senate with their strength in low-populous states. The well-educated have gained enough social, cultural and economic power to dominate the formation of intellectual ideas and organizational policies, setting rules and promoting norms for society at large. But they are not numerous enough in the larger electorate to reliably protect their governing choices from political revolts fueled by the greater proportion of citizens with less formal education, who can easily resent what they view as a privileged and arrogant class of elites attempting to force its own beliefs upon them.
For a growing number of citizens, the most important difference between Republicans and Democrats has shifted from economic policies to cultural values. Even the corporate sector, a traditional source of institutional support for the conservative movement, underwent a remarkable cultural shift alongside the well-educated citizens who represent most of its leadership and management ranks — as well as much of its most affluent customer base — on issues such as LGBTQ rights.
These developments have produced a climate that sets intellectual, bourgeois, multicultural Democrats against down-to-earth, traditionalist, nationalist Republicans. Like other forms of polarization, this dynamic has a self-reinforcing quality, creating a feedback loop of greater and greater mutual separation as citizens respond by adopting the cultural values that they come to associate with their favored party or relocating themselves into a more congenial opposition camp.
The Democrats remain a coalition party that must balance the priorities of highly educated supporters with an enduring need to attract strong popular margins among voters of color, many of whom lack college degrees. And, although Democratic candidates are much less dependent on votes from whites without diplomas than they once were, the party still cannot afford to entirely ignore this sector of the electorate.
Forty years ago, non-college whites constituted an outright majority of the Democratic membership; 20 years ago, they still represented the party’s largest single electoral bloc. Today, whites without college degrees remain important as a supply of pivotal votes for Democratic candidates, especially in key battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, but they can no longer expect to steer the party or prevail in disagreements with other coalition partners.
Democratic leaders have been increasingly compelled to embrace a relatively new role defending the prevailing cultural values of the metropolitan bourgeoisie — a stance that became more palatable and even unavoidable once Donald Trump, who reveled in offending these voters’ sensibilities, became the ubiquitous face of the Republican opposition. Despite Democrats’ enduring self-definition as the political champions of the socially vulnerable and underprivileged, the party has welcomed a steady movement of well-educated, Trump-averse voters into its membership while suffering the parallel desertion “of less educated whites.”
The Democratic Party has been reshaped by a society in transition. While well-educated citizens who are comfortable with today’s rapid social change echo Kamala Harris’ vow that “we’re not going back,” millions of their fellow citizens believe instead that making America great again requires returning to the simpler life of the past.
This story was adapted from Polarized by Degrees © 2024 by Cambridge University Press and reprinted with permission.
