White, College-Educated

That makes me what?!!

I’ve never been much of a group person — no clubs to list in my high school yearbook, no fraternity affiliation in college, no Lion’s Club or Rotary Club, no fantasy football league, and definitely no Mensa. I went to college on athletic scholarship, but in the “jock dorm” my track and field teammates and I were housed with the golfers, so only borderline in the “jock” group I suppose. Shamefully, I haven’t even been that interested in my mom’s tireless work over decades on my family’s genealogical record, a group, with a very low bar for membership, I inherited at birth.

Imagine my surprise, then, over the past few years as my interest in politics (my distress) bloomed discovering that I have been involuntarily inducted into a mysterious group — “white, college educated.” This revelation seemed promising, an unexpected opportunity to see just what, if anything, I had missed over the years. So, I began searching for details about this group — leadership biographies, meeting schedules, maybe extra-curricular activities like a softball team. My borderline jock side was anticipating a cool logo on a tee-shirt or hat — WCE! Maybe even a mascot?

Not even close. This group has nothing going for it — no mascot or logo, no softball team, no golf scramble, not even a membership card. I did note that there is often a dividing of WCE by gender, but I couldn’t find evidence that the women have organized anything substantive either. Not a single luncheon — almost beyond belief. So, I decided to look deeper and wouldn’t you know. Ultimately, it’s all about politics — not camaraderie, fellowship, logos or luncheons. Politics! And in that context, it seems a comparison with a different group — white, without a college degree — is obligatory. And it’s here that I find the single positive aspect of this whole disappointing membership in WCE — the other group thinks I’m “elite.”

I’m not one to question a compliment, so thanks. But I confess I’m struggling to understand how spending my college days stuffing rats, impaling insects, and smearing acne “juice” on agar plates catapults me to “elite” status in any universe. I’m a little suspicious that tag is intended as a sarcastic insult. At any rate some big news lately, it seems, is about the migratory patterns (“elite” ornithological term) of these two groups, not geographically, but politically. Spoiler alert — college educated whites have moved significantly over the past 20 years from favoring Republican Presidential candidates to favoring Democratic Presidential candidates.

The chart below illustrates both groups favoring Republican in the 1988 election of George H.W. Bush — college educated whites splitting almost 60%-40% in Republican Bush’s favor —and both trending toward a more equal split in Democrat Bill Clinton’s 1992 election, but whites without a college degree favoring the Democrat Clinton by 4% or 5%. That same pattern held in Clinton’s 1996 re-election — whites without a college degree favoring the Democrat — but by the 2000 Bush v Gore election whites without a college degree voters had switched “teams” to favor the Republican by about 5% points and, more notably, favored Republican by a greater margin that whites with a college degree (who were nearly split 50-50). More recently, in the 2008 and 2012 elections of Democrat President Obama, college educated whites switched “teams” to slightly favor Democratic, and the two groups have diverged at an increasing rate since, where in the 2020 election college educated whites favored Biden by 12% points or so (e.g. 56% for Biden, 44% for Trump) and whites without a college degree favored Trump by nearly 20% points (e.g. 60% for Trump, 40% for Biden)! For the record, neither group of non-whites — college degree, yes or no — has drifted into favoring a Republican presidential candidate over this time period.

Forty-year Presidential voting trends of white voters grouped by those with a college degree and those without.

It’s tempting to jump to a conclusion that whites without a college degree are responsible for the Trump-aligned slide toward cultural hatred and political authoritarianism we’re now experiencing. The photo below reminds us that this assumption is far from true. Not only did approximately 44% of our “elite” group go for Trump AFTER more than five years of observing his incompetence and divisiveness leading up to the 2020 election, but these Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives and other “elites” in state houses, Governorships, conservative “think tanks,” and extreme rightwing media are leading the charge to 2024 AFTER the 2020 ATTEMPTED OVERTHROW OF THE ELECTION, and doing their very best to erase that inconvenient bit of history to boot. So, what is going on in national politics with respect to education levels of the white population and their voting trends? I want to know and WCE doesn’t have a newsletter to provide an explanation.

WCE Republican members of congress (yes, there are two non-white members in the photo, making this a bit of a “where’s Elmo” puzzle as well as a snapshot of total dysfunction)

The chart I posted above comes from a Jason Willick opinion piece, October 1, 2023, in the Washington Post condensing a “working paper” by political scientist William Marble of the University of Pennsylvania. What Explains Educational Polarization Among White Voters? gets deep into the issues, including how the education divide plays into non-college whites’ distrust of institutions (because they are generally led by college-educated individuals). The main point, it seems, is that while economic issues used to influence white, college-educated voters to lean toward the Republican platform — an “anchoring bias” to libertarian economics — this tendency is changing. College-educated whites are now displaying a greater affinity toward “progressive” economics and, on the cultural front, greater racial identity concerns. More importantly in today’s environment, white voters without a college degree have placed less value on progressive economics and much more emphasis on cultural issues — moral*, racial, abortion, guns, LGBTQ, etc.

Professor Marble’s concludes that both political parties face uncertainties about this change. Punditry often suggests that this pattern presents a dilemma for both parties. Should the Democratic Party embrace cultural liberalism, alienating the white working class? Or should it center economic policy, at the risk of alienating wealthy cultural liberals? Republicans could face a similar dilemma. Embracing identity politics may pay dividends among the working class, the argument goes, but could alienate the business wing of the party. Conversely, if Republicans emphasize their conservative economic platform, it could drive away the working class.

It strikes me that this migration spells more trouble for the Republican party than for Democrats, however. I’ve already written about the inexplicable attraction of economically challenged voters to the Republican party, which offers them literally nothing to improve their economic outlook. In my post Don’t Cut Your Nose Off to Spite Your Face I concluded that fear and rage heaped on daily by Fox News and others has kept them distracted from acting politically in their own best interest……for decades.

I’m convinced that college educated whites moving to the Democratic party is primarily tied to cultural issues as well. Professor Marble agrees, acknowledging that at the current time, economic policies do not appear to be the catalyst for party migration — it is cultural issues. And in that arena, I ask myself which party, since 2020, is most likely to attract or, maybe more importantly, repel more voters from either of these demographic groups?

I will admit that searching for a logical answer in this political environment is like looking for the little pony in a giant pile of horseshit, but I’m betting that more white college educated voters will abandon their historical bias — an economic-related “anchoring bias” — and flee the Republican party in 2024. While the cultural issues have been contentious for years and years, this past eight- year period has been something different altogether. The Republican party, with a monumental assist from Fox News and other fertilizer distributors, has embraced and promoted alternate realities far beyond the “big lie” that Trump won the election. And one thing you can presume to know about anyone with a college degree is that at some point in their life they knew how to think — that their brains developed new neural networks for evaluation and problem solving that have to be silently begging for a return to reality. This eight-year long tsunami of bullshit has to, at some point, become too much to sustain the denial, and don’t forget that the worst of it has been after the 2020 election and, therefore, not even reflected in that Democratic win.

Some college educated whites must be seeing the reality of 250,000 excess COVID deaths in “red” counties attributable to nonsense conspiracy theories. And how does everyone ignore the much-anticipated Republican-triggered audit of Arizona’s Maricopa County “fraudulent” voting where a rag-tag, partisan group called Cyber Ninjas couldn’t find any of the long-trumpeted “massive” fraud but cost the county at least $4 million to replace the ruined voting machines. There are audio tapes of Trump sharing classified information and clear evidence of the failed plot to substitute fake electors to steal the election for Trump. And even facing three straight election cycles of LOSING virtually every Republican Senator and House member has petitioned the Supreme Court in a case related to the 14th amendment’s exclusion of insurrectionists to keep Trump on the ballot. The insanity is endless, and I’m proposing that for some college educated whites (not currently a member of congress) their participation in what is unmistakably a cult must surely become too much to bear.

Even more, as if the alternate realities aren’t enough, add a giant helping of raw hate — Mexican rapists, trans children, librarians, Bud Light, military casualties — weekly specials on Fox News. Below is a map illustrating the concentration of college educated residents across the country. If you know anything about the geography of the U.S., it’s apparent by the clumps of darker green that this “elite” educational demographic is concentrated in metropolitan areas — San Diego, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Raliegh, Columbus, and all the places Donald Trump, Fox News and the Republican party like to describe as “hellscapes” with lots of “death and destruction.”

College educated white Republicans who live in these places know this is absolute bullshit, lies intended to frighten people in Arkansas and Kentucky. Those Trump-labeled Mexican rapists are their friends and co-workers — that “immigrant-poisoned blood” might be a proud new addition to their own families’ blood in many cases. In areas beyond the reach of Republican cruelty women in a crisis pregnancy can still access appropriate care, parents of LGBTQ children can depend on professional advice and guidance for their children, other cultures proudly share their foods and festivals and their love for the freedoms this country offers, and nobody is banning Anne Frank from the public libraries. And as college educated White Republicans, like the ones in Florida and Texas and Tennessee and Ohio and North Carolina, come to the 2024 election I’m willing to bet that many — at least enough — will look around and recognize where the actual hellscapes are growing and exactly who is providing the fertilizer. Reality always wins — Go WCE!!

* I had to * the word “moral” here because I personally find Republican attacks on women, African Americans, immigrants, LQBTQ individuals and we “elites” trying to destroy the country profoundly immoral