Polarisation by education is remaking American politics
DEPENDING ON where exactly you find yourself, western Pennsylvania can feel Appalachian, Midwestern, booming or downtrodden. No matter where, however, this part of the state feels like the centre of the American political universe. Since she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris has visited western Pennsylvania six times—more often than Philadelphia, on the other side of the state. She made her seventh trip on October 14th, to the small city of Erie, where Donald Trump also held a rally recently. Democratic grandees flit through Pittsburgh regularly. It is where Ms Harris chose to unveil the details of her economic agenda, and where Barack Obama delivered encouragement and mild chastisement on October 10th. “Do not just sit back and hope for the best,” he admonished. “Get off your couch and vote.”
That western Pennsylvania has become such contested ground tells you a lot about how America’s two major parties have changed. Voters are increasingly divided by their educational degrees; the traditional working-class base of the Democratic Party has eroded and been replaced by the college-educated. This trend is not uniquely American—it is visible among parties of the left across Europe. But its impact on America is strong. Educational polarisation has remade the map of battleground states and districts and triggered ideological changes in both parties. It has transformed not just where candidates campaign, but what they say.
It used to be that high educational attainment was a reliable predictor of Republican voting. George Babbitt, the eponymous main character of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satire of bourgeois conformity, is a college-educated real-estate broker for whom “the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany”. In later decades, data show the same. From 1952 to 2000, a majority of white voters with college degrees self-identified as Republicans.
From 2012, this affiliation began to weaken. It loosened even more once Mr Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016. By 2020, the white college-educated called themselves Democrats by a 2:1 margin. And there were many more graduates. Their share of the electorate rose from 8% in 1952 to 40% in 2020. Had the party held on to the rest of its support, this would have ensured an enduring majority.
Yet at the same time, Democrats lost support among whites without college degrees, who now favour Republicans by their own margin of 2:1. Polarisation along educational lines also means polarisation by geography because Americans increasingly sort themselves based on their educational credentials, with cities at the centre of the knowledge economy. That is why in 2020 Mr Trump won 2,588 of America’s 3,144 counties and still lost the popular vote by a wide margin. Educational polarisation also stoked conflict “over the proper source of American leadership and the proper direction of American culture”, write Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins, two political scientists, in their incisive new book “Polarised by Degrees”. This transformation, they observe, has led the Democrats to “adopt a reputation for cultural progressivism, intellectual erudition, and demographic diversity…while traditional venues for conservative discourse have lost influence to more populist and anti-intellectual platforms”.
One goal of the Harris campaign is to change that. Of its 50 offices in Pennsylvania, 16 are in counties that Mr Trump won by double digits in 2020. “The challenge is that if you look at the work that people are doing, who are living paycheque to paycheque outside of the big cities, it often is not the type of work that the Democratic Party is associating itself with,” says Conor Lamb, a former Democratic congressman based just outside Pittsburgh.
The fight over Mr Lamb’s old district is a microcosm of the test Democrats face. It requires an answer for anger about deindustrialisation. “We suffered through terrible trade deals that really hurt places like western Pennsylvania, pushed by Wall Street and a corporate management ideology that just chased the cheapest and weakest labour and environmental rules,” says Chris Deluzio, the one-term Democratic incumbent. His Republican challenger, Rob Mercuri, a state representative, agrees that outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, especially steel, was “directly tied to policy choices that elected leaders have made over the years”. But their prescriptions differ immensely. The left, in Mr Mercuri’s view, offers “well-intentioned but really wrongheaded government interventionist, big New Deal-style policies”, the result of a “disconnect…related to this kind of highly educated, elitist mindset”.
In 2020, Democrats promoted ideas exciting to the college-educated, such as defeating systemic racism. Ms Harris was no exception. The national Democratic Party has realised that promoting anti-racism is a losing strategy. This time, Ms Harris is pitching herself as a pro-fracking, gun-owning, common-sense Democrat who likes unions and is wary of corporations. Her economic agenda is concerned with protecting American jobs through industrial policy and funnelling more tax credits to workers. Mr Trump, too, has moved the Republican Party to the left on economic issues, courting unions and promising tax cuts on tips, social security benefits, even car-loan payments. Whether it is working is hard to tell. The voters both candidates are jostling over are not just unfriendly to the country’s college-educated elites: they are reluctant to answer pollsters too. ■
Correction (October 15th 2024): An earlier version of this article misspelt Matt Grossmann’s name. Sorry.
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