Why educational level became the best predictor of how someone will vote

Washington () –– American voters are divided in many ways (by gender, race, region) and any of them can be used to explain the current state of politics.

More women support Democrats, a gender gap that is likely to widen in the wake of the fall of Roe v. Wade, who turned the United States into a country with states with abortion rights and states with abortion bans.

The extent to which former President Donald Trump can divert support from Vice President Kamala Harris among voters of color, Latinos and black men could have consequences in states where close margins are expected.

Rural voters generally side with the Republicans while urban voters side with the Democrats. Whoever can get an advantage in the suburbs will win in November.

But there’s something even bigger dividing voters, according to veteran Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, who was former President Bill Clinton’s political director and is known for his incisive deep analysis memos.

“The biggest and best predictor of how someone will vote in American politics today is educational level. That is now the new dividing line in American politics,” Sosnik told David Chalian on the “ Political Briefing” podcast.

Sosnik argued that Trump’s rise over the past three election cycles “accelerated and completed this education-based political realignment that had been building since the early 1970s, at the beginning of the decline of the middle class.”

As the United States moves into a 21st century economy, there is a gap between people who achieve an education, “who have become the foundation of the Democratic Party,” and people who feel left out as “that group of voters is now the basis of the modern Republican Party.”

Like Sosnik already wrote above, there is data to support this. In an August report on growing income inequality in the U.S., the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis documented that for every dollar of wealth in a household headed by a college graduate, a household headed by a college graduate high school is 22 cents. The figure increases to 30 cents for households headed by someone with some degree, but not a degree.

Put another way, college graduates own about three-quarters of America’s wealth, but they represent only about 40% of the population.

There is a direct correlation with politics. In 2020, according to exit pollsvoters with a college degree represented 41% of the electorate and supported President Joe Biden 55% to Trump’s 43%. Trump won support among about two-thirds of white voters without a college degree, but lost among college-educated white voters.

Sosnik went a step further, arguing to Chalian that the seven or so battleground states that could be won by Trump or Harris also tend to be right in the middle in terms of education levels, “without skewing too much toward voters with university education or those who do not have it. “That’s the only reason they are different from the rest of the country,” he said.

The Lumina Foundation has a report that uses census data to rank states by educational attainment, including post-secondary certifications and associate degrees. It’s true that most of the battleground states (Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt and Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona in the Sun Belt) rank close to the average. There is also one important exception. Nevada, which is a battleground state, has one of the lowest levels of educational attainment in the United States. While most of the states with the highest educational attainment are blue states in the Northeast, Utah, a red state, is also near the top of the list.

To the extent that traditional swing voters are persuadable in this election, Sosnik argued they could be people like political independents like Nikki Haley’s Republicans.

But there is a second group of undecided voters that Sosnik said is even more important. These voters are not choosing between one candidate or another, but rather they are deciding whether to vote or not.

For Trump, it’s about white, non-college-educated voters in general, particularly men, who “if they vote, you know they’re going to vote for Trump,” he said. For Harris, they could be women who don’t normally participate in the process but will do so this year, the first presidential election since the Supreme Court allowed some states to ban most or all abortions.

Young voters, who are less confident in casting their ballots, also fall into this second type of undecided voter, Sosnik said.

Trump’s entire success in politics has been based on appealing not to independents, but to those who “are not traditional voters,” he said.

Educational realignment could also change the way we view presidential elections compared to midterm elections in previous years, he said.

“Until Trump, Democrats always did better in presidential years because the infrequent voters were Democrats,” Sosnik argued. “Republicans always did better in low voting years because the voters with the highest propensity were Republicans. Now that has completely changed.”

This also includes the current state of the race according to Sosnik, where the vice president appears to have reached a plateau, but they could still lean toward Harris if she can “step up and close the deal” with undecided voters.