How the Diploma Divide Took Over Our Politics
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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyPolitics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Think back to the night of the 2016 election, if you will, for a moment. As the results rolled in and Trump's victory became evident, there was something else glaringly obvious in the data.

Americans were realigning along educational lines. The main takeaway from that election was that non-college educated white voters were swinging right. But a closer look at the data also showed that college educated voters were swinging left.

And in the time since, those trends have become more entrenched. While Democrats have won subsequent elections, they've had very limited success winning back the working class voters who'd voted for Obama just a decade prior. And likewise, places that once defined the Republican Party, like Harris County, Texas, seat of Houston and home of the Bushes, are no longer seriously competed over by Republicans.

In the new book, Polarized by Degrees, How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, authors Matt Grossman and David Hopkins argue that this transformation, which predates Trump, is the largest and most consequential change in American politics since the realignment of the Democratic South, and that its consequences may be impacting our culture just as much, if not more, than our politics.

So as we prepare for another presidential election, will these trends continue or abate? Here with me to talk about it are the authors. Matt Grossman is a professor of political science at Michigan State University. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks. Good to be with you. Also here with us is David Hopkins, professor of political science at Boston College. Welcome, David. Thanks very much, Galen. So I got a lot of questions, but before we dive in, I want to give you the chance to describe the thesis of your book in your own words. So, Matt, why don't you take it away?

There's been a transformation in American politics and society that has made that diploma divide both possible and influential. Educational attainment has been increasing, so college-educated voters have become a reasonably sized constituency for the Democratic Party.

The culture has been moving leftward. There are liberalizing trends in social issue positions and in views of the family, race, gender, nearly all of the topics that we think of as encompassing the culture war.

So those liberalizing and increased educational trends have transformed our politics, but they've sort of moved the Democratic Party pretty substantially, while the Republican Party coalition tries to stay about the same and represent voters who feel that things are moving too fast.

And they have succeeded electorally in moving us to a 50-50 country. But that shouldn't undercut the real liberalizing trends in our culture that have now encompassed our institutions, universities, the media, non-profits.

Even companies are increasingly habitated by the college-educated liberal class that has liberal positions on social issues, and it reflects those tendencies. And that is a big part of why those institutions have become part of our wider culture war.

We think that the diploma divide is often discussed simply in electoral terms. People are obviously fascinated with the kind of demographic crosstabs of who's supporting the Democrats and Republicans and projecting that onto the electoral map and tracing that change over time. But the story we tell in this book is not just about elections.

It's about the two parties governing between elections as well, and in particular, how they make policy. Democrats, as the party now of the college-educated, are also becoming more and more the party that believes that public policy should be made by credentialed specialists who are well-educated themselves and who have the intellectual capability and knowledge to propose sound public policies to solve our great social problems.

And that is sort of their vision of ideal governance in the modern era. Whereas Republicans have come to treat credentialed experts with a lot of suspicion. They see these as people who are culturally alien to them, people who are intellectually arrogant and who look down on regular folks, want to boss regular people around whenever they get the chance.

And so if we look at the way that government has responded to major issues like climate change, like the COVID crisis, like higher ed policy and other areas, we see increasingly this divide in the parties that is in part a divide over whether people with disabilities

high educational status should be deferred to as the experts who can help the rest of us, or whether they should be resented as liberal ideologues who are arrogantly trying to dictate to the common people of America.

Yeah, Dave, this is one part of your book that I found really interesting and somewhat complicated, which is are Democrats just technocrats who want to trust the experts and Republicans don't like, you know, solutions based in evidence or mistrust solutions based in evidence? Or is part of the issue what Matt described, which is that because liberals have sort of come to power in these institutions, particularly in academia, that

that their ideology is represented in a lot of the expertise that gets published. So, for example, you'll see that when academic research doesn't really align with the American modern liberal worldview, it's either pushed to the side or not published or not really interrogated or valued, whereas things that do sort of promote the liberal ideology of today really get heralded as, oh, this is expertise.

Well, of course, when the experts use their authority to say that actually conservatives are more correct about something than liberals, you'll get a bit of a change of attitude. But I think what we argue is that that is more the exception than the rule. That in fact, most academic experts and increasingly over the last 10 years

have used their expertise not only to come out in favor of left-of-center positions in areas that directly concern their own specialties, but in fact to endorse liberal positions across the board.

We saw this during the COVID crisis, where it wasn't just the case that public health specialists were saying, you know, everyone should social distance and mask and do the other things that we say because we know best about communicable diseases. But also, a lot of them endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement that was happening at the same time and said that being for public health also meant fighting racial injustice.

And so that sort of behavior, I think, has worked both to strengthen the identification of educated liberals with the Democratic Party and with this technocratic vision and to increase suspicion on the right that a lot of this is really ideology in the guise of expert opinion.

And experts do have greater knowledge. They just also have distinct values and interests, and their pronouncements are going to be a combination of that greater knowledge, but also those distinct values and interests. And we saw that in COVID. We see it in new policy debates all the time.

Part of our interest is that the policymaking system is increasingly complicated and expert driven. Even seemingly moral issues like guns and abortion require lots of background knowledge and information about prior policy debates. And so it really is this kind of expert dominated world.

which is now different because we're fighting more about the issues on which the college educated and even more than college educated expert class disagrees or has distinct values from the nation as a whole. All right, let's talk about the politics of it. So the most recent New York Times Center College poll shows Harris winning 61% of voters with a bachelor's degree or more and Trump winning 56% of voters with a high school degree or less.

That is absolutely a realignment of where we were a couple decades ago when country club Republicans still in many ways defined the Republican Party. Those folks had college degrees and the working class in many ways defined the Democratic Party.

Is that enough to say, though, that we are polarized? Obviously, there are a lot of college educated people voting for Trump in this case, and there are a lot of non-college educated people voting for Harris. So while sort of the side that the majority sits on has shifted, is education the main thing that is polarizing us?

Well, there are obviously multiple dimensions to polarization. Education is one of the dividing lines that's become bigger in this country over time. We see polarization, obviously, between more or less religious people. We see it among different racial groups. We see geographic polarization. So we're not claiming in the book that this is the only important form of polarization, but we do think it's a kind of an under-recognized one. And one of the things that I think

feeds into that is that when people talk about us being a polarized country today, they often portray the sort of two camps as kind of completely entrenched and stable.

and that sort of everybody puts on the red jersey or the blue jersey the year they turn 18, and that's how it is for life. And they insulate themselves in media cocoons and cable news outlets that just reinforce their stable current preferences, and they're not at all open to influence from anybody else. And we think that while there's some

some validity to that picture of contemporary American politics, it's pretty incomplete because it can't account for change. And we think we're seeing an important change. And this is really a book about change. This is a book about the migration of two sets of voters from one party to the other over time.

that migration may not be over. I mean, yes, there are still plenty of non-college educated Democrats and college age educated Republicans, but it could be that we're just midway through what may even be a more dramatic change in the future, especially if the diploma divide starts extending in greater magnitude to non-white voters as well as the white voters who have mostly been the movers so far.

So, we do think it's a polarizing force. You know, one of the important aspects of polarization that scholars are interested in today is social polarization. It's just the fact that more and more people inhabit social networks and contexts where they come into contact primarily with people who share their politics.

And of course, because people tend to work with, live near, and marry people who are of similar educational attainment to themselves, whether they have college degrees or don't, the fact that we're seeing the progression of the diploma divide is, I think, going to turn out to be one of the major factors that's reinforcing this social polarization trend.

We also try to situate this internationally because all over the rich world, education is replacing income as a dividing line between the left and the right. What's different is that in the US we have the strictest two-party system in the democratic world. And so all of that change has to occur not just within two large sides of left and right, but within two parties. So things that would occur

as an anti-immigration populist far-right party elsewhere, instead make their way within the Republican Party in the U.S. and things that might occur as a Green Party or a Liberal Party elsewhere make their way within the Democratic Party and really transform the images of the parties in the image of things that would

counter trends or anti-institutional trends elsewhere. The other piece is that the education divide is also geographic. It's not just the people with college educations that are trending left, but the people who are surrounded by other people who have college educations, whether it's geographic, occupational, professions.

social networks, all of those things matter. So this is also about culture, not just individual attributes. And the big difference with other markers of social difference between the parties is that the political system, like all other institutions, is dominated by college-educated people.

You know, 95 percent of members of Congress have college degrees. Almost 70 percent have graduate degrees. The same is true in other kinds of political institutions. So it's not the same as, you know, other kinds of divides between the parties where we would see representation from the other side in the political class. Instead, we really have the voters dividing on a dimension that divides the political class from the country. How did we get here and why? Yeah.

Well, the short answer is that the 60s happened. And we're still, not only just as a nation, but I think as a planet, dealing with revolutionary changes in our society that have happened in really very recent time, if we have perspective on it, within the lifetimes of a lot of people who are still walking around today. We've seen revolutionary changes in...

beliefs, attitudes, and behavior in so many respects in terms of religious pluralism, gender and race equality, globalization, the increasing access to education, especially for women and for disadvantaged people and for people of color.

We've seen technological revolutions that have changed how people get information and how they learn about the world and how they see their place in the world.

This change has been led disproportionately by educated people who have been the first often to adopt these new ideas, these new values, these new ways of thinking about social relations and have disseminated these ideas and the justifications for them more broadly in the population via the educational system, via the news media, via major social institutions.

And so our view, and again, Matt was talking about how this isn't just a story about the United States. Our view is this is a story really about the world and there are distinctive, important aspects of it for American politics. And that's the focus of our book. But our book also notes

how much of this is happening around the world and how much of the backlash to all this change is happening around the world. That conservative populism with nationalist flavor is not just a unique American phenomenon. It's not just because Donald Trump sort of semi-accidentally happened to win the Republican presidential nomination because we have this weird nomination system in America or we have Fox News here or whatever. You look at Europe, you look at much of Latin America, you look, you know, lots of other countries

places that are comparable to the united states politically you see the same dynamic of a more educated intellectual technocratic global oriented socially progressive left

increasingly getting its support from people who are higher educated, facing off against a more nationalist, traditionalist, populist right that gets much of its support from the less educated. And so while we have a two-party system and a separation of power system and a federalist system and all kinds of other things that make the story distinct here in the United States, this is really about, I think, our moment in history.

We want to acknowledge that there's a lot of complexity to these storylines. There's racial change, there's gender change, there are changes in cultural values that aren't exclusively the product of increased educational attainment or differences between the educated and the less educated. So we're not claiming that this is the one and only thing that is changing in American politics, but we do think that it has, number one, some reasons to believe that it is like

likely to continue to be influential. One is that it's international. Another is that it's longstanding. Yes, the Trump election allowed a lot of people to see this. But if you look at the trends further back, you notice that college educated voters used to support Republicans. So we had to have the flip

before we had the increasing division. And so if you look at, say, trends among minority voters today, we don't know that they are going to stick with the Democratic Party and not have the same educational divides that white voters have had. They do differ on the same kinds of issue attitudes by education as white voters. So we

know that the story is complicated and has lots of pieces, but because we're seeing it internationally and over a long period, it suggests to us that some of these factors affected the speed, the degree of change, but not necessarily that this kind of change would or has occurred.

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Obviously, politics is something of a marketplace. And if a party is doing something that's not working for it, usually it will change course. That obviously wasn't the case with Trump and the Republican Party post 2020. But the Democratic Party seems to be pretty reactive and in some cases almost obsessive about how their positions and how their political pitches are being viewed by the American public.

So I wonder if Democrats view this equation as ultimately redounding to their loss. In American life in general, about 38% of Americans have a four-year college degree or greater, and the rest don't. You could understand why losing non-college-educated voters and winning college-educated voters would be a bad bet in the long term. So do you think that Democrats see this trend as

see it as a threat, are going to pivot or have already pivoted. And therefore, this may abate sooner than we think. I think that Democrats do see their...

being a vulnerability here. And we have seen even in the nomination of Biden and in some of the positions Democrats are taking and, for example, talking more about trying to not just provide ability for people to get college degrees, but to try to provide good jobs for people who don't have college degrees, which is kind of a new way of talking for Democrats, that they are strategically responding to the decline of

support for their party among the white working class. But there are a couple of limitations on their ability to kind of redefine themselves. Number one, of course, is that Democratic politicians still need to win primary elections. They need to get support from the base of their party financially and organizationally in order to win nominations and be viable candidates. And a lot of the

base of the Democratic Party is pretty socially progressive and technocratic and likes people who who have that style of politics. And even Joe Biden. Wait, the base or the activist class? Well, to some extent, there's the activist class, but there's also the base in terms of like the primary electorate.

which may not all be activists, but they're the people who decide nominations. And so even Joe Biden in 2020, who on the one hand was sort of the let's win back the white working class candidate, but he was also someone who in order to win the primaries had to move leftward on abortion funding, had to distance himself from his previous record on criminal justice, had to endorse transgender rights and other newly important causes for social progressives. And so, you know, like many politicians,

The pivot to, you know, when one block of voters has to contend with the strategic risks of offending some of the other voters that are already in the party. The second thing, which I think is another feature

theme we like to advance in the book that we don't always think is sufficiently acknowledged is that the parties have a limited ability to strategize their way out of these bigger situations they're in. That a lot of what we're talking about in the book is beyond the power of politicians to completely control.

We have these major social trends that have been happening in our culture and in our society for decades and decades that are affecting people's daily lives in all number of ways. And so much of the backlash

on the right to social change isn't necessarily even about the things that democratic politicians are doing. It's things like, well, now you have to press one for English when you call the cable company, or people are saying happy holidays instead of Merry Christmas. There are so many things that are not really in the power

of strategic politicians to sort of manage. And sometimes politicians are kind of at the mercy of these bigger forces. And I think that that's part of the story of politics today as well. Right. I think you're talking about the culture and how politics may be downstream of culture.

And I wonder if also, though, in that arena, things have started to abate. I mean, you mentioned happy holidays and press one for English was to feel a little bit maybe like culture wars of a decade or so past. Today, we're talking about pronouns. We're talking about attitudes we should have versus immigration. And it seems like there may be a shift backwards and that ultimately this isn't just

just even mostly about whether or not you have a college degree, it seems like en masse people might be rejecting part of liberal ideology. There are a lot of people with college degrees who think the predilections of the elite left within academia or whatever are crazy.

And so in the same ways that there were social arguments in the 60s and 70s that liberal activists tried were rejected by the public, things like racial quotas and the like, and then weren't talked about again for like 30, 40 years. Is it the case that some of these ideas just may well be rejected and the culture and the party move on?

We're not claiming that the left wins all cultural battles, and certainly there are times when it goes too far and acknowledges that. But the overall trends are still pretty substantially leftward. Yes, we're going to see some thermostatic reaction. You know, under Biden, we wouldn't expect these trends to be as strong as they were under Trump. If Harris is elected, they won't be as strong as they would be under a second Trump administration.

The trend over decades is still pretty liberal. Yes, some social fights we're not having anymore, but often that's because conservatives have ceded ground on them. We've moved on from gay marriage to talking about transgender rights. And so some of these are not given up. They're victories of the left that we then move on from to new social controversies.

So there are trends back and forth. Some of them have to do with being the opposite of political trends or policy trends of the moment. But there still is the long term leftward shift in our values and culture that gives conservatives something to respond to all the time. Just real quick on the what are the problems for Democrats? There are real problems. Number one is the class image of the party.

You know, from the 1950s to the early 2000s, the number one thing people said they liked about the Democratic Party in open-ended responses was that it was the party of the working class or the common man. And in every election over that same period, the number one thing they said they disliked about Republicans was that it was the party of big business or the upper class or the rich.

So that was a very stable, important image of the two parties that slowly reversed as education replaced income as the dividing line between the parties. And it's not something that's easily rectified by having a slightly different candidate or talking in a slightly different way if the composition of your party has changed in a way that doesn't necessarily match that.

The other real threat to the Democrats is if these kinds of divisions extend to black, Hispanic and Asian American voters. They do internally disagree along the same lines on cultural issues, along educational lines. So if non-college black, Hispanic and Asian American voters start to move towards Republicans,

in line with their cultural issue positions, that would be a pretty severe negative for the Democratic Party unless it's compensated for elsewhere. It sounds like you all think they will, that this trend is we're not done yet. Is that right?

We're, especially maybe me, leery of being too confident in making predictions about the future because who knows what the future will hold. But there's lots of reason to believe that this is one of the aspects of polarization that tends to be somewhat self-reinforcing over time.

that as college educated people grow more numerous and especially grow in positions of influence in the Democratic Party, that the Democratic Party will more and more adopt the values and the image of those kinds of people. And that will help attract more of those kinds of people, but repel other kinds of people away from the party and vice versa for the Republicans. Obviously, the Republicans have had their own transformation that is somewhat self-perpetuating in the era of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

Obviously, all trends are subject to change in the future. But this does seem like something that, again, is not just some kind of temporary deviation from a larger pattern. It seems like this is something, again, that's not just true of the U.S., but other countries as well. And as long as the major axis of political conflict is moving from economic redistribution and

class interests to these social and cultural matters and battles, then that would certainly suggest that the trends in terms of the educational divide will continue to be perpetuated.

Based on how the 20th century played out, it felt intuitive that politics would be waged along class lines because that was a lot of how we understood global conflict, not even just national conflict. And also that obviously people want what is best for them economically, financially. We see all the time that in polling, the economy is the most important issue that Americans and voters are thinking about.

What are the motivations for keeping cultural issues polarized along educational lines the motivating force in American politics or even politics around the globe? What do people get out of it?

This is a source of potential variation. Globally, the parties have divided more along educational lines where they have emphasized social issues more relative to economic issues, and that's also true in the United States. And it's not inevitable that they always will. So the 2012 election, for example, was one where both parties sort of felt it was in their strategic interest to talk more about the economy and economic issues.

And so, you know, we could see changes in the issue agenda. It's not inevitable that it will get more and more in every single election.

But these are, number one, the activist base, the donor base, the politicians of the Democratic Party. So it's hard to see them deciding to move in a completely other direction. And of course, we've seen what happened to people who tried to challenge the trends within the Republican Party. It's also just the fact that the culture war is fun. For who? For who?

For lots of people, I mean, it's often upsetting, but it's also engaging. It's what gets people's juices flowing rather than debating the details of health care reform or tax policy inevitably. These are hot button issues that people care about that relate very directly to our own identities, to our own values, to where we sort of see ourselves in relation to other people.

They're particularly well-suited for a digital and social media and soundbite age where quick, punchy discussions of politics are in vogue. And in an age where most people don't have to worry about having a roof over their head and enough to eat,

Because of the post-World War II success in the Western world of increasing the standard of living and extending government benefits to previously disadvantaged sectors of the population, the rest of us are kind of free to fight over

over this culture war stuff. I mean, it's not just sort of like only the activists care. I mean, I think this is what motivates a lot of people to get involved in politics. It's what engages a lot of people intellectually with political conflicts of the day. Oh, I wouldn't argue that only the activists care. More the suggestion that activists, which make up a very small portion of the Democratic Party, have their own very distinct politics from the majority of the

the voters. And the same may be true on the Republican side as well. You know, these conversations that get enraged on Twitter or whatever, so few people actually engage in them, that maybe these ideologies, either right or left, are not really reflective of where the voters stand, whether they have a college degree or not, but just a

exactly what they are, ideologies. Well, there is a difference, which is that the Republican Party elites are part of the educated classes as much as they pretend not to be. That's true of the politicians. It's true of the consultant class. And so they're engulfed in these same kinds of college educated networks, even though they are rebelling against them.

On the Democratic side, the activist and professional and political class is not just college educated, graduate educated at elite institutions. And so there is a distinction. The distinction is actually bigger between the mass and elites of the Republican Party because they disagree on lots of these issues and come from completely different social positions.

But on the Democratic side, it does mean that there's lots of continued push to continue moving things in this direction. What do we expect the policy consequences to be of this being the main axis on which we fight about politics or divide ourselves into electoral coalitions?

You're certainly going to see more wars over the role of experts in policymaking. We really see COVID, climate change, and higher education itself as being harbingers of the way that we're going to have policy conflict in the future. But there is a weird disconnect between these kinds of electoral and wider cultural trends and the policymaking system, which is still, number one, often about

economic policy issues and budgets. And number two, still dominated by a college educated and professionally educated experts. When you think of things like congressional hearings, administrative agencies, any kind of place that is making policy decisions.

So that's why we think you're increasingly seeing the Republican Party sort of say no to it all and the Democratic Party weirdly embracing these institutions. But we think that the way that the parties relate to these institutions, it really shows how much things have changed. You know, the New York Times and Harvard University were not the

champions of the left. They were not the people that the left looked to as, you know, these are the folks that we want to follow. And the right also was not necessarily against traditional institutions. It thought that there was threats to those institutions from radicals. We're in a different moment now where the right believes that these institutions have been, including government, but not exclusively government, even companies, have been taken over by radicals

educated liberals and their preferences, and the left is defending them.

I guess what I mean from a policy perspective is during the second half of the 20th century, it became clear the kinds of policy battles that would result from the class divide, which is Republicans arguing for, well, Reagan's three-legged stool, but including laissez-faire economics, low taxes, free trade, Democrats arguing for higher taxes, more spending on benefits to help the working class.

If this is going to be the thing that we argue about, if what divides us is going to be sort of education-related class-

What is the policy debate going to be there? Is it just immigration? Is it something else? What are the policy proposals of both parties? And does it also mean that we've come to a consensus on economics? Well, one of the things I think people thought might happen in the sort of first bloom of the Trump movement was that the Republicans were going to move left on economics. And you might

think that conversely, a Democratic Party that got more of its support from affluent suburbanites would sort of move to the right. And so we would end up with a kind of a depolarization, at least on economic policy compared to other kinds of policies. But what's interesting is that hasn't really happened. Now, trade is kind of its own issue that has often not cleanly

cut along party lines anyway. But if you look, for example, at tax policy, the first Trump administration, its biggest legislative achievement was a fairly traditional Republican tax cut centered on beneficiaries in the corporate sector and wealthy individuals. Deregulation of business is a major policy priority of the Republican Party and in sort of all of its representation across the three branches of government, including the judicial branch.

And Democrats have not really faced much pressure to run to the center on economics because it turns out that you can convince people making six-figure incomes that they should still resent people making seven and eight-figure incomes and adopt sort of center-left positions on health care access and regulation and things like that. So

We're seeing, obviously, a change in prioritization about what issues are the parties fighting over the most in the public sphere and in campaigns. But in terms of the actual policymaking record of the parties, we still see on all of these different policy dimensions as much polarization as we did before and sometimes even more. Matt talked about higher ed. Higher ed used to be a pretty not that polarized area.

of public policy, especially at the state level. Members of both parties supported state university systems, supported increasing access to college degree, you know, degrees and programs at the state level. And now that the Republicans increasingly see higher ed as sort of colonized by their political enemies, we're seeing much more division than we had before.

on the budgets and the policies and the programs and the disciplines of higher ed in Florida and South Carolina and Texas and all these sort of Republican controlled states. So the policy implications, I think, seem to be not in the direction of depolarization, but in fact, in the direction of greater polarization.

The prioritization does matter, though, and this is a place where we think that people have been looking for more changes in the Republican Party, but maybe haven't noticed the changes in the Democratic Party. You know, the Biden administration's major accomplishments were in the area of climate change and student loan forgiveness.

There wasn't a major redistributive initiative. There was a change in the kinds of actions that activists and politicians prioritized, and it could continue. That doesn't mean that they abandoned their previous policy positions, but I do think that matters to the image of the party and to our predictions about where it will go from here. On the Republican side, a lot of the demands

you can't really achieve them. You know, they're about stopping the spread of cultural change, reversing social trends that are in motion, not really things that are in under the control of politicians. What that translates to is often governance that's just about not doing things, about stopping things, about making public stands without necessarily accomplishing a whole lot

of change. And because we have these two big party coalitions, that's enabled the traditional allies of Republicans to still prioritize their economic interests in policymaking. All right. Well, we will see what happens next soon enough, in fact, on November 5th. But thank you for now for joining me, Dave and Matt. Thank you. Bye.

Thanks very much, Galen. This was a lot of fun. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Tretavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.