Polarization through education is reshaping American politics

DI finish where Just as you find yourself, Western Pennsylvania can feel Appalachian or Midwestern, prosperous or downtrodden. But no matter where this part of the country is, it feels like the center of the American political world. Since becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris has visited western Pennsylvania six times — more than she visited Philadelphia, on the other side of the state. It made its seventh trip on October 14, to the small city of Erie, where Donald Trump also held a recent rally. Democratic nobles travel through Pittsburgh regularly. It is where Ms. Harris chose to reveal the details of her economic agenda, and it is where Barack Obama offered both encouragement and mild punishment on October 10th. “Don’t sit back and hope for the best,” he warned. “Get off your couch and vote.”

That Western Pennsylvania has become such contested ground tells you a lot about how America’s two major parties are changing. Voters are increasingly divided by their educational levels; The Democratic Party’s traditional working-class base has been eroded and replaced by college graduates. This trend is not only American, but is evident among left-wing parties throughout Europe. But its influence on America is strong. Educational polarization has redrawn the map of battleground states and regions and sparked ideological changes in both parties. This has changed not only where candidates campaign, but also what they say.

Higher educational attainment used to be a reliable predictor of Republican voting. George Babbitt, the main character in Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satire of subservience to the bourgeoisie, is a college-educated real estate broker whose “senators who controlled the Republican Party were deciding in small, smoke-filled rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament.” and customs tariffs. And Germany.” And in subsequent decades, the data shows the same thing. From 1952 to 2000, a majority of white voters with college degrees identified themselves as Republicans.

Since 2012, this affiliation has begun to weaken. It softened further when Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016. By 2020, white college graduates called themselves Democrats by a 2:1 margin. There were many graduates. Their share of the electorate rose from 8% in 1952 to 40% in 2020. Had the party retained the rest of its support, this would have guaranteed a permanent majority.

But at the same time, Democrats have lost support among whites without college degrees, who now favor Republicans by their own 2:1 margin. Polarization along educational lines also means polarization by geography, as Americans increasingly sort themselves based on their educational credentials, with cities at the center of the knowledge economy. This is why in 2020, Trump won 2,588 out of 3,144 US counties, yet lost the popular vote by a large margin. Educational polarization has also fueled conflict “over the proper source of American leadership and the right direction of American culture,” write Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, two political scientists, in their insightful new book, Polarization by Degrees. This shift, they note, has led Democrats to “embrace a reputation for cultural progressivism, intellectual erudition, and demographic diversity…while traditional venues for conservative discourse have lost influence to more populist and anti-intellectual platforms.”

One of the goals of the Harris campaign is to change that. Of its 50 offices in Pennsylvania, 16 are in districts that Trump won by double digits in 2020. “The challenge is if you look at the work that people do, who live paycheck to paycheck outside of big cities,” Conor Lamb says. “This is often not the kind of work the Democratic Party associates itself with,” the former Democratic congressman based outside of Pittsburgh.

The fight over Lamb’s old district is a microcosm of the test Democrats face. It requires an answer to the anger over deindustrialization. “We’ve suffered through terrible trade deals that have really hurt places like western Pennsylvania, driven by Wall Street and a corporate governance ideology that has just gone after cheaper, weaker labor and environmental rules,” says Chris DiLuzio, a one-term Democratic candidate. His Republican challenger, state Rep. Rob Mercury, agrees that the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, especially steel, has been “directly tied to the policy choices elected leaders have made over the years.” But their recipes vary greatly. The left, in Mercury’s view, offers “well-intentioned but really wrong government interventionist, New Deal-style grand policies”, the result of “the disconnect… associated with this kind of highly educated, elitist mentality.”

In 2020, Democrats promoted exciting ideas for college students, such as defeating systemic racism. Ms. Harris was no exception. The NDP has realized that promoting anti-racism is a losing strategy. This time, Harris is promoting herself as a pro-fracking, gun-owning, common-sense Democrat who loves unions and is wary of corporations. Its economic agenda is concerned with protecting American jobs through industrial policy and providing more tax breaks for workers. Trump also succeeded in moving the Republican Party to the left on economic issues, courting labor unions and promising to cut tip taxes, Social Security benefits, and even car loan payments. It’s hard to know if it works or not. The voters that both candidates are fighting over are not only unfriendly toward the country’s college-educated elites: they are reluctant to answer polls, too. ■

Correction (October 15, 2024): A previous version of this article misspelled Matt Grossman’s name. Sorry.

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