Q&A of the Day – Trends w/College Educated Voters & Blue-Collar Workers
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
Social: @brianmuddradio
iHeartRadio: Use the Talkback feature – the microphone button on our station’s page in the iHeart app.
Today’s Entry: Good morning, Sir. I enjoy your show each morning, especially the question of the day and the top three takeaways. I am one who voted for John McCain because of Sarah Palin. I would not have voted for him except for her. So, there is at least one vote changed because of the VP pick.
I have a question for the day, how come supposedly college educated people vote for democrats? I always hear college educated vote one way and blue collar another way. I don’t understand. I am a college graduate. I try to listen to both sides and be a little open minded. I have been wrong about stuff in the past.
People supporting open borders, not being energy independent and other issues. Are people not thinking at all? Half the country is wrong. I don’t know why this Presidential race is even close. I suspect it may not be close because the media has lied about everything else. They can’t cheat as easily if it’s a blowout. Then I wonder, if half the country is wrong, I hope I’m on the right side. Ha ha.
Thank you to you and Joel and your team.
Bottom Line: Thank you for listening and for the especially thoughtful note. I’m reminded of my father who started out doing blue collar work on the railroad in Buffalo, New York as a Democrat, earning enough money by doing so to put himself through college and eventually ending up as a white collar Republican in corporate America, in Georgia. Times change, candidates change, political parties change, and people change. In my father’s case he’ll tell you that it wasn’t his personal evolution that led to his switching of political parties but rather that of his political party. The last Democrat he voted for, for president, was JFK. As he’s quick to tell you if asked, JFK was more conservative as a Democrat president, than most elected Republicans are today. He’s the classic case of a person who says that he didn’t leave his political party but that his original political party left him.
That anecdote plays into this conversation as a significant part of the political calculus between shifts in college educated and non-college educated voters. But first let’s look at the facts and see how they lineup in comparison to the narrative that college educated voters have become Democrats with non-college educated voters trending towards the right.
In the 2020 Presidential election Joe Biden won college educated voters by a 55% to 43% margin while Donald Trump won 50% of non-college educated voters. That’s an important place to start in this analysis. The narrative (that college educated voters are now Democrats and non-college educated are Republicans), doesn’t quite fit the size of the results that we’ve seen. I’m not sure that you can say that a 5% gap between presidential candidates is a defining political characterization yet – that hasn’t stopped CNN from producing their recent story “Why education level has become the best predictor for how someone will vote”: According to a political expert cited by CNN: The biggest single, best predictor of how someone’s going to vote in American politics now is education level. That is now the new fault line in American politics. (Trump) accelerated and completed this political realignment based on education that had been forming since the early ’70s, at the beginning of the decline in the middle class. It was just on Wednesday that PBS ran a 10-minute segment under the heading: How a college degree is one of the best predictors of which candidate voters support. Within the segment was this explanation: College-educated voters used to be more likely to vote Republican, but it wasn't education. It was really income that was driving that relationship. Instead of having the rich vote Republican and the poor vote Democratic, what you have is the more educated voting Democratic and the less educated voting Republican, which means that there's almost no difference based on income anymore.
Now, just as I think the college educated vs. non-college educated narrative is more pervasive than actual voting results are with education splits, it is true that most college educated voters used to vote for Republicans and most recently most have voted for Democrats following a multi-decade trend towards that direction. However, I believe it’s an oversimplification as presented a la the media narrative stated by PBS: what you have is the more educated voting Democratic and the less educated voting Republican. Who is the world’s richest person? Would you say that Elon Musk is educated or more uneducated than most people? By the media narrative’s definition, he’d fall into the less educated category. Ditto Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Jack Dorsey and the late Steve Jobs. In other words, most of the most successful innovators of our time. There’s a big difference between non-college educated and lessor or uneducated which is the implication.
That leads to what I believe is the most understated dynamic in play in this conversation. The difference isn’t so much between “the educated” vs. “uneducated" which is a way for the elite media to overtly look down their nose at Trump supporters.
The biggest observed difference I’ve come across is those who’re “formally” educated the longest. There could be numerous reasons for the tide changing over time but there’s one that would appear to be at the top of the list. The increasingly partisan agenda of educators and the extreme political splits over educators based on political preferences. Here’s the political breakout of educators by grade level:
- Preschool Teachers: 74% Democrats
- Elementary & Middle School Teachers: 85% Democrats
- High School Teachers: 87% Democrats
- College Professors: 90% Democrats
The education establishment is dominated by Democrats at all levels, but notably each progression educationally becomes more liberal. It’s understandable that after 16 formative years of being educated by almost exclusively Democrats, one might be more inclined to side with Democrats politically. The only professions that exist with a greater concentration of Democrats than college educators are mental health workers, librarians, editorial boards for news organizations, Hollywood and social and environmental workers. That’s it. By way of comparison, a study conducted in 1969 by the Carnegie Foundation found that professors were nearly evenly split along political lines with 27% identifying not just as Republicans, but conservatives. As a 1999 update to that study found, the fastest growing segment of the teaching profession weren’t just Democrats, but rather self-defined “liberals”. Twenty-five years later the impact is evident.
The biggest political shift hasn’t necessarily been education level but rather the radical political changes within the education establishment.