Trump is losing college educated Republicans
by digby
I wrote about the latest poll numbers for Clinton and Trump among white college educated people for Salon today. It's bad news for the Republicans:
Democratic strategists have worried for years about their party's decades long erosion among members of the white working class. What was once the backbone of the party has shifted over many decades to the GOP, causing a lot of soul searching among people whose ideology has generally favored the concerns of working families. This was first characterized as a problem related to the loss of white southerners, famously illustrated by a comment attributed to President Lyndon Johnson upon signing the Civil Rights Act: " we have lost the South for a generation." But Ronald Reagan's victory proved that the shift was not confined to the southern states as many members of the white working class elsewhere also moved to the GOP to vote for Reagan and stayed there.
There have been many articles and books written about this phenomenon and I don't want to get into them here. Suffice to say that some combination of culture war issues, racial resentment and economic decline has pushed these former Democrats into the Republican column over time. But there has been less attention paid to the parallel shift of white college educated voters to the Democratic Party during the same period.
The Atlantic's Ron Brownstein has been calling this the "class inversion" in which the two parties have exchanged the two white voting factions. He describes it this way:
This generation-long resorting has profoundly reshaped the balance of power both between and within the two parties. Combined with the growth in the minority population, the Democrats’ improving position among college-educated whites has allowed them to win the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, despite consistently large deficits among the non-college white voters who constituted the bedrock of their coalition from Franklin Roosevelt through Jimmy Carter. Conversely, the Democratic decline among blue-collar whites has been key to the recent Republican dominance in the House of Representatives.
He points out that the primary electorates of the two parties have also undergone the same change which explains why Trump's crude right wing populism has been successful and why Clinton's multi-cultural, college educated and older voter coalition won her the Democratic nomination. Trump carried 47% of the Republican white working class and only 35% of college educated voters. Clinton won college educated whites in 17 of the 26 states with exit polls and lost roughly the same numbers of the white working class. According to Brownstein, with Trump's base of blue collar white men and Clinton's base of college educated white women (as well as people of color) these two candidates are uniquely positioned to finally complete this class inversion.
This is a very bad sign for Trump. First he has not a snowball's chance in hell of capturing more than a handful of minorities to make up for the loss of college educated whites. His racism, religious intolerance and xenophobia almost guarantee that the Democrats will maintain, and probably expand, on their dominance among this growing group of Americans.
All classes of white voters are shrinking as a percentage of the electorate, but within that demographic the number of college educated whites, especially college educated women, is expanding. White men without a college degree constituted 28 percent of all voters in 2004 and by 2012 they were just 17%. Meanwhile college-educated white women were just 11 percent of the vote when Reagan was re-elected in 84 and had grown to to 19 percent in 2012. There are more of them than blue-collar white men. Meanwhile, non-college-educated whites have shrunk from 65 percent of the white electorate when Reagan was sworn in to 36 percent in 2012.
So as much as the Republicans may have blown their chances with the rapidly growing Hispanic population with their foolish selection of Trump, the loss of these college educated whites could be even more devastating to their future prospects. The party has been losing some of these voters over the years but they have carried a majority in every election since 1952 when they first began tracking the category, even in the 1964 Johnson landslide against Barry Goldwater. Mitt Romney won college educated whites by 14 points in 2012. If the trend accelerates in this cycle so that Clinton wins a majority, they're unlikely to go back to the GOP. Just as the Reagan Democrats turned into Republicans, so too will these Republicans become Democrats.
The latest Bloomberg poll of college educated voters has some very bad news for the Republicans:
Among all college-educated likely voters, including those with post-graduate degrees, Clinton leads 54 percent to 32 percent, a much bigger margin than President Barack Obama’s 2-point advantage with a group that represented 47 percent of the electorate in 2012. Among voters with just a college degree and no post-graduate degree, another subgroup Romney won in 2012, Clinton is ahead 48 percent to 37 percent.
“It's extremely hard for any presidential candidate to win an election conceding double-digit deficits among segments of the electorate that their party has competed for and won in the past,” said pollster Doug Usher, who led the survey. “This poll indicates that Trump might be doing just that.”
Clinton runs even with Trump among college educated white men but those college educated white women really can't stand him. They prefer her 54-33 percent. (Even when you include the Libertarian and Green Party candidates she beats Trump among this cohort 45-27.)
So where does this leave white working class GOP voters? The Republican Party may not have any answers for them on the economic front but it represents their interests in ways that are important to them and they have a right to vote on that basis. But even if they don't get white working class votes, Democrats will not abandon them and they ironically have people of color to thank for it.
The Democratic Party is still the party that supports unions, labor laws, universal health insurance, public education and a government safety net for everyone. They have a commitment to ensuring that all kids are offered a secure future regardless of their parents' political affiliation. Whatever temptations they may have to cater to their more affluent educated white voters, their large number of working class people of color demands that they stay true to those ideals which will benefit the white working class as well. That's what egalitarianism is all about. They will benefit whether they like it or not.
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