As analysts began digging into Donald J. Trump’s dominant victory this week, a key theme from the past two presidential elections emerged yet again: College-educated voters are on an island.
Exit polls released by NBC News early Wednesday suggested a widening chasm between voters with a college degree and those without. Only 41 percent of college graduates voted Republican, compared to 54 percent of voters without a degree.
The 13-point college-degree gap in 2024 was more stark than 2020, when exit polls showed a 7-point divide, and 2016, when it was 9 points.
Democrats increasingly see their eroding support among voters who didn’t go to college as a political liability. Only half of American adults have some kind of college credential, and just one-third hold a bachelor’s degree.
The head of the American Federation of Teachers recently told The Chronicle that the party erred by pushing college for all. Vice President Kamala Harris explicitly moved away from college-for-all language and emphasized paths to prosperity without a postsecondary education.
Here are three education-related findings in NBC’s exit poll.
As in 2020, white voters without college degrees voted overwhelmingly Republican, with two-thirds of them supporting GOP candidates. Fifty-four percent of white college graduates backed Democrats.
Harris’s roughly 10-point margin among white voters with degrees was far higher than President Biden, who only won that group by three points.
But voters of color shifted slightly right regardless of education level, with roughly one-third voting Republican, compared to only one-fourth in 2020. Among this group, high-school graduates were only two percentage points more likely to support Republicans than their college-educated peers.
A majority of voters with associate degrees, 56 percent, voted Republican — compared to 45 percent of voters with bachelor’s degrees and 38 percent of those with advanced degrees.
People who attended some college but did not complete a degree proved the most evenly divided, with 47 percent voting for Democrats and 51 percent voting for Republicans. Voters who never attended college were the most likely to support Republicans, at 63 percent.
While about half of men of all education levels voted for Republicans, a degree divide widened the gender gap. Among white voters, only 29 percent of men without a degree voted for Democrats, compared to 47 percent of men with a degree.
While 57 percent of college-educated white women voted for Democrats, only 35 percent of white women without a degree did so.
NBC and CNN exit polls have not yet provided granular data for gender and degree status beyond white voters.
Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, urged caution in reviewing the data. “Exit polls are not currently reliable indicators of demographic-group shifts,” Grossman wrote in an email.
Nevertheless, he said, “the main surprise is the across-the-board and national pattern of Democratic losses, even greater in non-swing states.”
Educational polarization would continue to follow long-running trends in future races, he added. Those voting patterns, he said, “are not that responsive to the particular campaigns and candidates of 2024.”
