Doug Sosnick (profile here) was Bill Clinton’s political director and is a Democratic strategist.
After decades of observing American politics, he said on a CNN podcast, “The biggest single, best predictor of how someone’s going to vote in American politics now is education level. That is now the new fault line in American politics.”
Certainly there’s an education fault line among voters, but it’s not a clearcut one. People with college degrees are tend to vote for Democrats (the split was 55% – 43% in 2020), while people without degrees tend to vote for Republicans (about 2-to-1 in 2020). Read story here.
It’s tempting to assume better educated people are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans because they’re better informed, less gullible, and too logical to fall into the grip of conspiracy theories.
But another fact calls into question the importance of intellectual capabilities in voting behavior. That fact is income and wealth disparity.
“In an August report on growing income inequality in the US, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis documented that for every dollar of wealth in a household headed by a college graduate, a household headed by a high school graduate has 22 cents. The figure rises to 30 cents for households headed by someone with some college, but no degree.”
When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, his campaign manager famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was then, and is now; if Trump is elected in 2024, it will be because of voter anxiety about inflation, lack of affordable housing, and a general feeling of economic insecurity.
There are other divisions in American politics: Rural vs. urban, by gender, race, and feelings about abortion. I’m not sure it’s accurate to call any one of them a reliable predictor, and perhaps least of all education, when the college-educated cohort splits 55-43 in the voting booth.
Education level undoubtedly has something to do with voting preferences, and the GOP does appear to have more than a fair share of delusional nutcases. But I don’t see a clear split along educational lines, either in the polling and voting data, or from what I observe in real life.