Education level represents the biggest shift in support that led to what happened in 2016
While it is important that we have moved on from the 2016 election and forge the coalition we need to win moving forward, there is a component of our election losses from 2010 to 2016 that just has not been fully addressed and needs our attention.
That is what happened to our support from people that do not hold college degrees.
These numbers represent the change from 2012 cycle to 2016.
- We lost 4.7 million votes from non-degree holders while gaining 5 million votes from degree holders. For the first time in any American political parties history, we got more votes from college graduates than non-graduates. Sounds good, but it's not for a variety of reasons we will get into below.
- Trump gained 2.3 million votes from non-degree holders and lost about 400,000 votes from degree holders compared to Romney’s 2012 totals.
In 2008 the vote for Obama was around 39,000,000 votes. That is the largest block of votes any Democratic presidential candidate has ever gotten from any cohort. Heck, Obama even surpassed Reagan’s slaughter of Mondale with this group (Kerry actually drew the second largest vote from this group).
It was by far our largest bloc throughout our parties history (a lot of factors there, of course, principal among them the low number of degree holders historically, but still that means it is important).
Non-degree holding voters dropped off by roughly 8 million votes since that high water mark. College degree holders are now our largest voting bloc by education level. That is a bad thing in our system.
Why is it a bad thing our biggest voting bloc is college graduates?
Look, I am not an anti-intellectual by any stretch of the imagination, although I do feel we have turned too many of our issue discussions into being comprehensible to only those familiar with the academic discourse on the topic. That is something to guard against. But the main problems with our largest voting bloc being degree holders include:
- It bear’s repeating, the largest voting bloc for any party in history was nondegree holders for Obama in 2008. To have it drop from that pinnacle by nearly 8 million votes in just 2 cycles should alarm us, and I am not sure why it doesn’t. If I remember correctly it is now only our 3rd largest voting bloc.
- The states with the highest percentage of degree holders per population are most of the solidly blue states. Running up the score with degree holders will not help us win majorities in the Senate, House or the Presidency if we are losing support from non-degree holders by the millions each cycle. I have a handy table to illustrate the problem below.
- And, despite our own bit of mythology building, the problem is not confined to white working class workers without degrees. We lost white and non-white non-degree holders at a similar rate between 2012 and 2016.
This is not simply a white working class problem we face
Let’s look at data related to bullet 3 first.
This chart represents a chaotic state in the Democratic cohort based on education level and race. The loss of non-degree holders is evenly distributed by race. (an important note, I went with white versus nonwhite construct for two reasons. The first, people think the “economic argument people” make is only meant to be about white working class non-degree holding voters, that is not the case. PoC without degrees are not satisfied with us either. Secondly, I used the white v nonwhite construct because I pooled data since the 1976 election for some analysis and racial reporting quality varied radically over the 40 intervening years, so getting more granular was too difficult to do without the data becoming unreliable.
Here is a quick table highlighting this point:
DEMOCRATIC VOTES FOR THOSE WITHOUT DEGREES
Year |
White Non Degree |
NonWhite Non Degree |
2012 Election |
18,891,958 |
16,044,851 |
2016 Election |
16,315,933 |
13,972,588 |
Change |
(2,576,025) |
(2,072,263) |
% Change |
-14% |
-13% |
There is a difference, but only a negligible one. We did lose half a million more white non-degree holding votes, but as a percent of the total vote from nondegree holders, the rate of change is almost identical no matter the race.
How did Trump do along these lines?
REPUBLICAN VOTES FOR THOSE WITHOUT DEGREES
Year |
WHITE NONCOLLEGE |
NONWHITE NONCOLLEGE |
2012 Election |
29,443,548 |
2,851,688 |
2016 Election |
30,370,198 |
4,268,602 |
Change |
926,649 |
1,416,915 |
% Change |
3% |
50% |
Comparing these two tables we can see that we lost 4.7 million votes from nondegree holders across all races and the rate of loss was similar between whites and the other racial categories combined.
Meanwhile, Trump only gained 2.3 million votes across races, with a significantly higher rate of increase in support from nonwhite voters without a college degree.
Most of these voters left us, they did not vote Trump. We must come to terms with this reality.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF OUR booming support from degree holders and oiur COLLAPSING SUPPORT FROM NON-DEGREE HOLDERS
This section related to bullet two above.
Here is a summary table of the states partisan makeup broken down into quintiles by education level. What that means is I looked at the % of people in each state with bachelor's degrees or higher and ranked them from top to bottom based on the highest to lowest % of degree holders. The summary itself just bundles the top 10 states by education level, then the next 10 and then the next 10 and so on.
I also break out the number of congressional delegations where either party has a majority of the members in Congress.
PARTISAN BREAKDOWN IN STATES RANKED BY EDUCATION LEVEL: PRESIDENTIAL RESULTS AND CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION STRENGTH
Education Level Rank by Quintile |
Clinton States |
Trump States |
Democratic Delegations |
Republican Delegations |
1st Quintile (ranks 1-10) |
10 |
0 |
8 |
2 |
2nd Quintile (ranks 11-20) |
7 |
3 |
7 |
3 |
3rd Quintile (ranks 21 - 30) |
1 |
9 |
0 |
10 |
4th Quintile (ranks 31 - 40) |
1 |
9 |
1 |
9 |
5th Quintile (ranks 41 - 50) |
1 |
9 |
1 |
9 |
- In the top 10 states with the most degree holding people, Clinton won all 10 and Democrats control 80% of the congressional delegations.
- In the 2nd 10 states with the most degree holding people, Clinton won 7 of those 10 states and Democrats control 70% of all congressional delegations.
- In the 30 states in the last three quintiles, with the fewest numbers of college degree holding voters, Clinton won only 3 states and Democrats only control 2 of those congressional delegations.
There are a ton of factors at work here, but the above summary highlighting the fact that running up the vote with college degree holders will not help us win Presidential elections if all our victories are confined to only the most educated states. We must expand our reach to some of these other states.
A FEW EDITORIAL COMMENTS, PLEASE DISCUSS
I do find it of interest that the one state we won in the lowest quintile was Nevada, a state with robust unions supported energetically by the local party.
I have reviewed data by all sorts of voting cohorts, race, gender, education, income level and crossing referencing all of these cohorts. The only cohort we are seeing this kind of dynamic change in is education level. The rate we are bleeding these nondegree holding voters away is likely part of why we have had such electoral troubles over the period of 2010 to 2016.
Finally, the record number from support from Obama from the nondegree holding cohort was not simply a function of “Star Quality”. The growth in support from this group was slight, Kerry pulled down the second largest vote from this group in 2004 (behind Obama). The "star Power Effect," if you ascribe to such a thing, only drew in about 300,000 more votes from non-degree holders, while Obama saw a spike of about 9.5 million votes from degree holders