The educated professional class is out of touch with America

Lesson #3 from Trump's victory.

I’ve been writing about the lessons that Democrats should take away from the big GOP victory in this week’s election. I’ve written about how identity politics is failing to attract Hispanic voters, and about how Dems cared too much about employment and not enough about inflation. The third big lesson, I think, is about class in America. The educated professional class is drifting away from the rest of the country, in terms of values, beliefs, and their information diet.

This election upended a lot of demographic trends that people had been very certain about only a few years ago. Trump seems to have produced a large-scale shift of Hispanic voters to the Republicans, and big cities swung harder toward the GOP than other areas. But there’s one key trend that this election didn’t reverse: education polarization. Trump was even more dominant among non-college voters than he was in the last two elections, while Harris won the highly educated by about as much as Biden did.

Source: Associated Press

Over the years, the Democratic base has shifted decisively from the working class to the educated professional class:

Source: Patrick Flynn

This shift doomed Harris’ campaign, since people without college degrees outnumber their college-educated counterparts — in 2024, the latter were only 43% of the electorate.

And this weakness looks likely to be a long-term problem. In the past, when college education was steadily increasing, it was easy to think that college-educated voters would own the future. But in recent years, the rate of college enrollment has plateaued and begun to fall:

Source: Statista

And the number of new college graduates fell in 2022, even as America’s total population grew.

As for why fewer Americans are getting a college education, I wrote a post about this back in July:

Americans are falling out of love with the idea of college

The short version is that tuition soared even as the earnings boost from a college degree shrank substantially, making college a less attractive value proposition. A lot of this had to do with colleges themselves boosting spending on administrators and facilities, and having to charge students more to pay for it.

If universities cut costs, cut tuition, and raised their value proposition, we could see enrollment rise again at some point, but I wouldn’t bet on that happening soon. Meanwhile, socialists’ plan for universal free college is dead on arrival; even Biden’s generous new student loan repayment provisions might prove to be temporary, since the fiscal cost is so huge. So a wave of taxpayer cash is not going to restore the trend of rising educational attainment.

In other words, Democrats’ education problem is here to stay. Unless Dems can figure out how to win back those non-college voters, they’re likely to be at a huge electoral disadvantage for the foreseeable future.

But winning back those voters would require the educated professional types who make up the backbone of the Democratic base and the progressive movement to figure out how to connect rhetorically with the less-educated masses, addressing their concerns, speaking to their values, and just speaking their language in general. And although it’s too early to tell, many of the reactions I’m seeing on social media are, to put it mildly, very unencouraging:

Obviously these are extreme examples, but in general it seems to me that the educated professional class has simply grown apart from the rest of the country over the past few decades.

A disconnect on problems

The most important disconnect between educated professionals and the rest of America is about the problems they face on a day-to-day basis. Practically every problem that Trump voters cited is something that hits the working class harder than the professional class.