How a College Degree ‘Supercharges’ a Divide Among White Voters

Frederic J. Brown, AFP, Getty Images

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, pundits and academics marveled at how the college degree had become a key political dividing line: Would Donald J. Trump become the first Republican presidential nominee in 60 years to lose among white college graduates? It appears that he did — and the division has only widened heading into the midterm elections, according to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, which found an unprecedented divergence between white women with college degrees and white men without degrees.

A college degree has “supercharged” the split among white voters, the Journal found. (Meanwhile, nonwhite voters of differing educational levels actually grew more closely aligned in their political views.) College-educated white voters prefer a Democratic Congress by a whopping 34-percentage-point margin compared with white voters without degrees.

The gap is even starker when split by gender. White college-educated women favor Democratic control of Congress by a net 33 points, while less-educated men favor Republican control by 42 points — the widest such chasm since the poll first measured it, in 1994.

What is it about a college degree — especially when filtered by race and gender — that so starkly correlates with political beliefs?

Deciphering any political “gap” by education, race, or gender is tricky enough. Layering them on top of one another makes the job even harder. But scholars have chipped away at factors behind those political fault lines in recent years.

In the social sciences, a college degree is more than just a piece of paper, said Tatishe M. Nteta, an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It’s an indicator of a set of networks and worldviews provided by the campus and classroom experience.

“People who have a college degree tend to be friends with, tend to work with, tend to live in neighborhoods with individuals who also have college degrees,” Nteta said. College students meet peers from all sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds, he said, and often learn about the histories of sexism and racism in their general-education classes.

In a recent paper, Nteta and his colleagues studied voter samples from the 2016 election to analyze what had driven the so-called education gap among white voters. In the four preceding presidential elections, the gap hovered at five to seven percentage points.

But “the 2016 campaign witnessed a dramatic polarization in the vote choices of whites based on education,” the scholars wrote, such that white voters with degrees split from those without degrees by 18 points, the largest such gap since 1964. (Back then, the party alignments were reversed.)

A common narrative attributed that divergence to economic dissatisfaction in the white working class. But the Massachusetts team found that sexism and “racism denial” — a stand-in measure for racist beliefs — were far stronger in explaining why those without college degrees favored Trump.

‘Racism Denial’

One reason for the widening gap could lie in how a college degree mediates one’s beliefs about gender and race. “Those who have a college degree are less likely to express negative views of racial outgroups relative to those who do not,” Nteta said. The 2016 campaign, marked as it was “by exceptionally explicit rhetoric on race and gender,” as the paper noted, could have brought those differences to the fore.

A college degree can signal a person’s access to information and critical-reasoning skills as well as her social class, said Susan J. Carroll, a professor of political science and women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University at New Brunswick and a senior scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics.

For instance, a college graduate may be less susceptible to claims that immigrants are “taking our jobs,” as Trump has asserted, not only because she has learned to think critically, but also because she is less likely to end up in a precarious economic circumstance than those without a degree.

Behind the recent split by gender and education is a long history of gender differences in political alignment, Carroll said. Since the election of President Ronald Reagan, in 1980, when men drifted toward the Republicans, women have favored Democratic candidates more often than men have.

There’s “no single straightforward explanation” for that, Carroll said, but she agreed that the hypercharged narratives of the 2016 election — including the possibility of electing the first female president — helped further splinter voter groups by education and gender.

Trump won white voters without college degrees by a net 50 points among men and 23 points among women, according to a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center. Those groups now favor Republican candidates for the House by 39 and 12 points, respectively, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Scholars are still debating the causes and effects of the Trump era’s political shifts. The clearest data points so far will become apparent this week, but that doesn’t portend clear answers. And exit polls, imperfect as they are, may reveal still less.

“I’m just looking forward to seeing where we’re at as a country on Wednesday,” Nteta said. Admittedly, his interest as a social scientist “usually means that the country might not be doing that well.” But “the vote in 2018,” he said, “is symbolic of who we are and who we’re going to be.”

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.