Republicans Once Led with College-Educated Voters

As Donald Trump pushes educated voters further and further away, he contributes to a trend that emerged during the 2004 election cycle.

Believe it or not, the Republican Party was the party of educated elites throughout most of the last century. The gap narrowed at times, but the GOP always had a slight edge among voters who had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher. That’s no longer true.

In the 2004 election cycle, college-educated voters favored Democrats over Republicans for the first time since pollsters started tracking education in 1992. Yes, the “college-educated liberals” are actually a new trend, despite what many people assume. By 2016, there was a 12-point gap among college-educated voters, tilting heavily towards Democrats, according to Pew Research.

That gap continues to widen, and that education gap is reflected by income gaps and urban-rural divides in politics.

Education correlates with earnings and where we live. Now, it correlates to voting for Democrats.

Strangely, Democrats don’t realize they have this advantage with the upper-class voters. They don’t seem to realize education and income are that intertwined.

Only 2 percent of Republicans earn $250,000 or more a year, but Democrats estimate that percentage at 44 percent, a mismatch of 42 percent. The majority of voters earning more than $100,000 annually tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Think about that. The Democrats still imagine a significant percentage of Republicans are wealthy, yet most high-income earners are Democrats.

Several social changes contributed to the shift in party loyalty among college graduates. Chief among these were who attended colleges and universities. In the 1970s, more and more women and minorities entered universities. Today, women are a slight majority of college students.

Also, the reasons people went to college changed as admissions became more egalitarian. There are now more than 4000 college and universities in the United States. The few thousand students at elite schools are outnumbered by those at state-sponsored institutions focused on vocational paths.

The people attracted to teaching at universities also changed, especially within the humanities.

Quite simply, the college graduate today is more likely to be something other than a straight white male from an upper-middle-class family. Donald Trump’s appeal is narrow: white, lower-middle-class, religious voters living outside cities. That’s increasingly true of the Republicans in general.

If demographic trends continue, the Republicans need to find a way to attract educated elites again. But, they also need to realize “educated elites” today are not the same homogenous group as in the past.

Democrats need to recognize that their party is now the economic and educational poles: the degree-holding high-income earners and the low-income earners without college degrees. These groups have different concerns, with the concerns of the educated elites often conflicting with the situations of the working class.

If the GOP self-destructs, the Democratic divisions will become more difficult to ignore.

My theory is that any “new” Republican Party will emerge from a Democratic split. That’s precisely how the GOP became what it is: Democrats split and the racists from the South became Republicans.

The aftermath of 2020 should be interesting, no matter the presidential election results.