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Since the election, there has been a certain amount of panic among Democrats over the fact that their party seems to be losing the blue-collar vote and becoming the party of college-educated voters. USA Today observes, [ [link removed] ] “Two-thirds of white men without a college degree supported [Donald] Trump this election, according to exit polling data from The Washington Post. So did 60% of white women who didn't go to college.” On the other hand, according to CNN exit polls [ [link removed] ], “[Kamala] Harris won white women with a college degree by about 15 points—an improvement over both [Joe] Biden and [Hillary] Clinton.” Trump won the votes of college-educated white men, but only by a 2% margin, much lower than in the past two presidential elections.
Why is this a reason for panic? There’s an old story about Adlai Stevenson, the Princeton egghead who ran for president in 1952 and lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower. After a particularly eloquent speech, a supporter approached Stevenson to assure him he had the vote of “every thinking person.” “That won’t do,” Stevenson supposedly replied. “We need a majority.”
You can interpret this as an expression of elite liberal condescension, but there is a point to it. A little under 40% [ [link removed] ] of American adults are college graduates, and in this election they were about 43% of voters [ [link removed] ]. That’s higher than it used to be, but having a lock on the educated vote is not enough to win elections.
Yet the college-educated vote is still a large enough bloc that repelling it is also no way to gain power. America absolutely needs a political party that is informed by the outlook and priorities of the college-educated—and less-educated voters will eventually feel the consequences of telling all the educated “elites” to go to hell.
The Diploma Divide
The educational divide can be seen in how people get their news about politics—or whether they get any news at all. A Northeastern University study [ [link removed] ] found that “voters for Republican Donald Trump were more likely to get election information from family and friends compared to Democratic and independent voters, who generally relied on traditional media.” The author of the study, John Wihbey, offers this conclusion:
“Trump voters and persons inclined towards Trump got a lot of their information from friends and family, which speaks to a kind of network tribalism that is apparent in American politics now,” says Wihbey, associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern.
“You can see a general reduction in the ability of high-quality news media to reach a lot of the citizenry.”
If people were tuning out traditional media in favor of a high-quality replacement, this wouldn’t be a bad thing. But the information they are getting is objectively junk. American voters consistently tell pollsters that the economy is the No. 1 issue affecting their vote—as they did in a Financial Times survey [ [link removed] ] a while back. Yet that survey also found that voters consistently answered basic questions about the economy wrong—questions that were a matter of clearly available data, not subtle interpretation.
Or consider that we developed a COVID vaccine in record time, saving millions of lives [ [link removed] ] and effectively suppressing the disease as a deadly threat. For three years in a row, COVID was the third-leading cause of death in the United States; this year, it is unlikely to break into the top 10 [ [link removed] ]. Yet since the arrival of a COVID vaccine, there has been a marked increase in opposition to vaccines—all vaccines, including early childhood vaccines [ [link removed] ].
A 2023 study [ [link removed] ] in The Lancet found that vaccine skepticism is tied to education levels: “Nearly all countries had higher self-reported receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine among the most-educated respondents than the least-educated respondents.” Anti-vaxxers have now been selected by the incoming president to head the Department of Health and Human Services [ [link removed] ] and, more ominously, the Centers for Disease Control [ [link removed] ].
This is what happens when voters choose on the basis of rumors and “vibes” [ [link removed] ] rather than facts.
The Constitution of Knowledge
Obviously, not all non-college-educated voters are this misinformed—nor does going to college automatically protect someone from making foolish choices or believing flim-flam. But there’s an obvious reason college-educated voters will be more likely to get their information from “high-quality news media” rather than the online or cable TV rumor mill [ [link removed] ]. A college education provides four years of training (or more) in how to do research, how to evaluate sources, how to weigh different claims of knowledge. If you’ve ever had to put footnotes in a class paper, you know that “I watched a random influencer on YouTube” or “I listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast” are not adequate citations. My editors here won’t even let me link to Wikipedia.
A college education also provides graduates with a base of technical knowledge that makes it easier to evaluate claims. Perhaps more crucially, it gives them a familiarity with the kinds of institutions that produce knowledge. If you’ve spent a few semesters doing lab work for your professors, you will be less inclined to believe modern medicine is all some kind of conspiracy cooked up by Big Pharma.
In short, college graduates are more likely to be familiar with and have confidence in what Jonathan Rauch calls the “Constitution of Knowledge [ [link removed] ]”—the institutions and procedures we use to test and refine competing claims in an attempt to find the truth. College graduates then move into a world of managerial professionals, where the main thing you must demonstrate in every job interview is that you know what you’re talking about. These are standards by which Donald Trump’s infamous “weave [ [link removed] ]” of irrelevant tangents and personal grievance would be disqualifying.
As Seen on TV
What do people rely on if they don’t know how institutions work and no longer trust them [ [link removed] ]? There’s a joke going around that anything can be an Unidentified Flying Object if you’re really bad at identifying things.
Similarly, there is a saying (in a couple different variations [ [link removed] ]) that everything looks like a conspiracy if you don’t know how anything works. Our systems and institutions are overwhelmingly run by the college-educated. Those who are not will find it easier to regard the people who work in mainstream institutions as a mysterious “elite” running things in ways they don’t understand.
But rather than becoming educated about how the system works—and at no time in history has knowledge been more easily available, just a few clicks away—it is tempting to take shortcuts. One result is Donald Trump’s “As Seen on TV” administration [ [link removed] ], dominated by people Trump chose because he saw them on TV: Dr. Oz on daytime TV, Linda McMahon in professional wrestling, Pete Hegseth on Fox News Channel and so on. There’s also a preference for famous names (RFK Jr.) and online influencers [ [link removed] ] (Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Kash Patel).
If you don’t understand institutions and their credentials and therefore don’t trust them, then go with what you do know: the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture. Vote for the guy you saw on TV all those years, so he can appoint other people you’ve seen on TV.
The ‘Leopards Eating People’s Faces’ Party
But the old cultural and institutional standards were created for a reason, and the populist rebellion against them comes with a price. It’s fun to thumb your nose at all those arrogant “elites”—until you find yourself actually governed by people whose only qualification is lying to you on TV [ [link removed] ].
People are already shocked to discover who pays for tariffs and shocked to discover [ [link removed] ] that Trump meant all that stuff about mass deportations. Quite possibly, they will soon be shocked to find out what happens [ [link removed] ] when we turn against vaccines. Voters who do not educate themselves will eventually be shocked that the results are the opposite of what they thought they were voting for.
It’s like the grim joke about voting for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party [ [link removed] ]: I never thought leopards would eat MY face! Those who cannot project the future results of their vote will eventually find out the hard way. Reality counts for something—in the long run, everything—and the party that cares about knowledge and expertise will ultimately produce far better results when it comes to the actual well-being of the public.
The Surprising Identity of the ‘Joe Rogan for the Left’
In the meantime, though, there are some who are trying to herd panicked Democrats into giving up on college-educated voters—to kick all those arrogant smarties to the curb and adopt the same populist style Trump uses to appeal to blue-collar voters. Some have proposed going beyond stylistic changes and altering the Democrats’ agenda, jettisoning so-called wokeness and joining Republicans in appealing to hatred of immigrants.
This is summed up in the call [ [link removed] ] for a “Joe Rogan for the left,” that would copy the style of the podcaster who specializes in credulous interviews with crackpots [ [link removed] ]. The problem is that there already was a Joe Rogan for the left: His name was Joe Rogan, and he backed Bernie Sanders for president in 2020 [ [link removed] ]. There is a reason he and a bunch of other fringe cultural figures moved to the right. They were motivated by precisely the kind of reverse snobbery that defines itself by opposition to the standards of the educated.
Becoming more like Joe Rogan will not help the Democrats win. Rather, it will make them seem like pale imitations of Trumpist populism, and it will validate forces that reject the best parts of the Democratic agenda. What’s the point of trying to fight Trumpism by appealing to a blue-collar resentment that just makes you another wing of Trumpism?
How to Build a Thinking Majority
Adlai Stevenson was right. A successful political party needs to appeal to a majority. But the “diploma divide” is recent and is not written in stone—and of course, it would be condescending to assume that only college-educated voters count as the “thinking man.” Remember also that politics is not static. Voters have recently swung toward right-wing populism, and they could very well swing back.
It’s worth asking why the diploma divide is new. Under the old standard, candidates in both parties would use populist rhetoric on the campaign trail and make broad appeals to the common man—but then they would dutifully journey to Washington, D.C., to give serious speeches at think tanks to demonstrate (with a greater or lesser degree of success) that they could talk intelligently about the big policy issues. Those are the rules the Democratic Party should stick to. A politician has to gain some credibility with blue-collar voters, while still being able to pass a job interview with college-educated voters.
Trump tried that [ [link removed] ] his first time around. This time, he figured out he could still win by not even pretending. But we will all pay the price for it, and in the future the American people just might appreciate a party whose leaders can show they know what they’re talking about.
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