Picture a young person leaving her rural, conservative community to head to college, the first in her family to do so. This is a tremendous opportunity for her, since a typical person with a bachelor’s degree earns more than double what someone with just a high school education does over the course of a lifetime. But it isn’t only her earning power that will change. In college she’ll be exposed to new and challenging information, meet people who grew up in places very different from hers, and be asked to interrogate ideas and values in a way she probably never has before.

To most liberals, all that seems like an unalloyed good for this young person. But her parents may see it differently. Even if they’re happy that she’s growing and learning, they may worry that what she experiences will alienate her from them. She might come home for winter break and challenge some of their long-held beliefs. Worst of all, now that she’s old enough to vote, she might pull the lever for Democrats.

A multitude of influential divides shape American politics today, over race, gender, age, religion, geography, and more. But in Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins make a strong case that the divide over education is the one that determines more than any other how our politics work. In a reversal of a longstanding pattern, Americans with college degrees are now more likely to vote for Democrats, while those without are heavily Republican, at least among the white voters who make up a majority of the electorate.

The book focuses on what the authors call the “Educultural Realignment” of the last few decades, a somewhat awkward phrase describing a profound shift in American politics. It’s about who votes for whom, but also who the parties represent at the level of policy, culture, and identity. While Republicans used to be the party of the educated elite and Democrats the party of the blue-collar working man, to a great degree they have now changed places.

This change did not happen suddenly; it has been underway for a few decades now. But only in the Trump era has the trend become too obvious to ignore. Consider the most visible marker, presidential votes. The last time a Democratic nominee beat a Republican among whites without college degrees was 1996, and since then this group’s support for Democrats has fallen dramatically; by 2020, Biden would win only about a third of their votes. In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump won white voters without college degrees by margins of more than 30 points. But he lost white college graduates by 17 points in 2016 and 15 points in 2020. Republicans have welcomed this shift as a kind of moral triumph, proof that at last they are (supposedly) “the party of the working class.” Meanwhile, Democrats—the party that has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, a run of success unprecedented in American history—regard it as a political crisis.

The Transformation of Institutions

Grossmann and Hopkins, who teach at Michigan State and Boston College, respectively, wrote their last book together, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats, in 2016. That book argued that while we tend to think of the parties as mirror images of one another (and the news media often portray them that way), in fact they are fundamentally different creatures, following different kinds of incentives and subject to different limitations. The Republican Party is organized around ideology, even if the relationship between what its elites desire and its rank and file will accept is often fraught. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is a loose collection of demographic and affiliation groups—African Americans, single women, union members, environmentalists, and so on—and its challenges stem from keeping those disparate forces moving in the same direction.

Eight years later, Republicans are leaning into their new working-class identity, while Democrats protest that the GOP is still very much committed to an agenda that primarily benefits the economic elite, and the working class should vote Democratic. But if the trends in votes and party affiliation are any indication, Republicans are winning that argument. Polarized by Degrees sets out to explain how we got to this point.

The first element in Grossmann and Hopkins’s story of political change is the steady increase in educational attainment. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, 17 percent of Americans over the age of 24 had college degrees, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Today that figure is over 37 percent.

That change helps to produce the second element: a leftward shift in opinions on social issues, driven in part by the greater number of college-educated people populating influential institutions and changing them to reflect their values. While college professors may have been more likely to be liberals for a long time—as the authors note, William F. Buckley wrote his jeremiad about the liberalism of his alma mater, God and Man at Yale, in 1951—Republican criticism of the academy has grown far more intense and central to the conservative political project only in the last few years. The Democrats and Republicans may be evenly matched electorally, the authors argue, but not culturally:

Expanding our field of vision beyond the electoral realm shifts the picture from a persistent stalemate to an increasingly dominant liberal advantage. The growing population of well-educated citizens has drawn on its disproportionate social influence—within educational systems, mass communication industries, professional and charitable associations, and corporate management structures—to empower trained experts and lead a leftward shift in cultural values and institutional policies. Americans of all political persuasions are experiencing changes in their everyday lives that bear the imprint of this new technocratic bent and cultural zeitgeist, from diversity training mandated by their employers to climate change modules in their children’s science lessons.

Even if the blue-collar people living in conservative areas who are most alienated by this cultural change are the least likely to experience it in their everyday lives, the nature of our mediated world is such that you don’t have to have been forced to sit through a DEI training to be convinced that the liberal establishment is ruining your life. In fact, the entire conservative media apparatus is devoted to getting its audience worked up over the idea that they are oppressed by liberalism.

While the backlash may be encouraged by conservative elites, Grossmann and Hopkins argue that it is not artificial. “Though they may sometimes be stoked by calculating politicians and outrage-baiting media personalities,” they write, “today’s cultural battles reflect the genuine emotional engagement of many citizens with the revolutionary changes in social norms, mores, and hierarchies that have occurred over their lifetimes.” And those changes are in many ways revolutionary. There are a series of social ideas that were outré half a century ago but are now, if not beyond question, at least solidly in the majority: Women deserve economic equality and personal autonomy; LGBTQ people deserve full civil rights; marijuana should be legal; racism is a pervasive force despite the passage of laws that banned explicit discrimination, and so on.

Even corporations are affected by the steady march of liberalism forced by the college-educated, the authors say: “[T]he well-educated and globally oriented white-collar metropolitans who hold most positions of authority in the modern corporate world occupy a social context in which left-of-center beliefs on matters of race, gender, immigration, and environmental policy are increasingly common.” Companies that you might not consider liberal at least claim to be devoted to certain liberal ideas. Oil giant BP, for example, may be doing its part to heat up the globe, but it has an LGBTQ+ page on its website where it touts a program called “Safe Space.” (Don’t tell Republicans, but there’s even a photo of a drag performer celebrating Pride in what looks like the employee cafeteria.)

The role the conservative media play in making sure people stay angry about things like corporate lip service to diversity is a topic the authors might have spent more time on (though they do acknowledge it). “If the central underlying message behind liberal media sources’ coverage of politics is ‘you’re smarter than they are,’ the corresponding subtext of conservative media content is ‘they don’t respect you,’” they write. That’s putting it mildly; it’s text, not subtext, and the real message of conservative media is “They hate you, they look down on you, and they’re trying to destroy everything you hold dear.”

And the supposed depravity of the American university is a regular theme of conservative media. If you’re a non-college-educated person living in a community with few people with college degrees, where are you going to learn about what goes on at Harvard and Columbia? From Fox News, and increasingly, from social media. The message you get will be relentlessly negative.

From Education to Politics

However that anger about a society increasingly dominated by those with degrees is reinforced, it is sincerely felt—and the political effects have only grown over time. And this is not a one-way street: As the authors note, the right’s reaction to Barack Obama’s election eventually led to the presidency of Donald Trump, which in turn created its own backlash that “only hastened the adoption of progressive values across most of the nation’s professional class.”

Yet the increasing number of college-educated voters in the Democratic coalition hasn’t changed the party’s approach to economic issues. Though cultural issues may garner more attention, on economics the party still favors a more redistributive system with higher taxes for the wealthy and stronger social supports. Likewise, Republicans still favor tax breaks for the wealthy and deregulation for corporations, though they are in the midst of a transition away from advocacy for free trade. That at least brings the GOP in line with the preferences of its less-educated constituents. But one could not say that either party is wholly pursuing the economic interests of all its voters.

Meanwhile, the parties look more demographically distinct—but mostly because of an educational shift among Democrats, not Republicans. The share of voters with college degrees within the Republican electorate has remained roughly the same of late: Their coalition is made up of about 60 percent non-college-educated whites, 30 percent college-educated whites, and 10 percent non-whites, just as it has been for decades. The Democratic coalition, on the other hand, has been transformed. In 1992 about half of Democratic votes came from non-college-educated whites, 30 percent from non-whites, and just 20 percent from college-educated whites. By 2020, non-whites made up the largest portion of Democratic votes (over 40 percent), followed by college-educated whites (over 30 percent). Non-college-educated whites’ proportion in the Democratic coalition had been cut almost in half over those three decades. In 2016, a majority of college-educated whites voted for the Democratic presidential candidate for the first time on record.

Against the Elite

This shift has made it easier than ever for Republicans to argue that the “elite” whom voters should despise is not the economic elite but the cultural one—not the guy who owns the factory and won’t give you a raise, but the adjunct literature professor at the local college who tweeted something that made you mad. The most fervently Republican voter may be someone of high income but low education, the owner of a half-dozen car dealerships who only graduated high school and fancies himself a blue-collar outsider looked down on by the swells. That is not that different from how Donald Trump presents himself. Though he brags about his Wharton degree and the size of his penthouse apartment, he does so to emphasize his burning resentment at the Manhattan Brahmins who never gave him the respect he thinks he deserves. Likewise, most right-wing media superstars of recent years pretend to be rugged men with no patience for the effete denizens of the faculty lounge.

Ironically, many of the most enthusiastic anti-elite culture warriors in the Republican Party themselves have the most glittering educational credentials, which doesn’t stop them from blaming Ivy League eggheads for all America’s problems. There is an entire class of highly educated Republicans who put on populist airs and pretend to be down-home reg’lar fellas, including Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law), and Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard Law). No one has waged war on American higher education with more venom than Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (Yale, Harvard Law). As J.D. Vance (Ohio State, Yale Law) said, quoting Richard Nixon, “The professors are the enemy.”

But it’s a pose, a way to convince voters that Republican leaders are on the side of “us” when in fact they’re mostly “them.” Grossmann and Hopkins note that “Among the most senior 200 White House staffers during the early months of the Biden presidency, 78 percent had earned a graduate degree and 41 percent had attended an Ivy League university,” while only “57 percent of senior aides in Donald Trump’s administration held graduate degrees, and just 21 percent were Ivy League alumni.” There may be a difference, but even the Trump Administration was run by the highly educated.

Meanwhile, Grossmann and Hopkins argue, the more the Democratic Party assimilates the perspective of the educated classes, the more value it puts on expertise—which is necessary to carry out an agenda that seeks to use government to solve difficult problems. The conflict then becomes one between “a Democratic Party that endorses ambitious and complex policy initiatives enhancing the authority of credentialed specialists,” and “a Republican Party that views the exaltation of expertise as a pretext for the empowerment of cultural elites to force a progressive ideology on the nation and its government.” Democrats have more wonks, and Republicans have more hacks, which is why Republicans are better (or at least as good) at winning elections, but terrible at policymaking.

To Republicans, this has come to be seen as not a problem but an opportunity. “Rather than emphasizing the development of intellectually convincing arguments to persuade expert communities of the value of their ideas, Republicans have instead sought to discredit major knowledge-producing institutions by launching attacks from their positions in elective offices and conservative organizations,” the authors write. And it’s working: Just between 2015 and 2023, the percentage of self-identified Republicans expressing confidence in higher education dropped from 56 percent to 19 percent, according to Gallup. (It also fell among Democrats, but only from 68 percent to 59 percent.)

Much of that effort to discredit higher education revolves around racial resentment. It’s hardly an accident that the increased attacks on universities coincided with a heightened academic focus on the complexities of racism, or that so much conservative attention is directed at affirmative action, critical race theory, and DEI initiatives. Nor is it an accident that the word “woke”—which originated as a term Black Americans used to denote awareness and understanding of racism and how it operates—is now the symbol for everything conservatives loathe.

Polarized by Degrees does a good job of explaining how the cultural shift of an increasingly educated nation with a large population of those who feel they’re being left behind has transformed both party coalitions. One can’t help but marvel at how deft Republicans are at exploiting resentment of the credentialed classes, often with the help of the news media and even many Democrats. As Grossmann and Hopkins note correctly, “After nearly every major electoral defeat, critics accuse Democrats of having lost touch with the cultural values of white heartland America.” Yet when Republicans demonstrate that they’ve “lost touch” with urban, multicultural America, there are few demands that they either present themselves before those least likely to vote for them and beg forgiveness or alter their policy agenda to better appeal to those who reject them. Nor is there much discussion in popular commentary or scholarly research of what Republicans provide in material terms for those who lack a college degree, beyond the satisfaction of giving a middle finger to the “elites.”

So the GOP benefits from being the antiestablishment party, while the only victories they deliver are cultural ones like outlawing gender-affirming care for young people. Democrats, on the other hand, may have an agenda that produces far more economic benefits and opportunities for those without college degrees, but they have a harder time presenting themselves as brave rebels fighting the power structure. Which will always be a powerful story to tell.

Nevertheless, Grossmann and Hopkins argue, Democrats enjoy substantial benefits from being the party of the educated classes. Their perspective and priorities dominate in many of the country’s most important institutions, and their cultural power has pushed society in the direction of their values on a host of issues. And since college-educated voters usually turn out in higher numbers, they can gain an advantage especially in low-turnout elections when less committed voters don’t bother to go to the polls. (This too is an inversion of recent history, when it was always assumed that elections with lower turnout benefited Republicans.) They’ve also had no trouble amassing campaign funds, often outraising Republicans.

Yet those with college degrees still make up only a third of the adult population—not enough to secure national electoral victories on their own. But as the aftermath of the Dobbs decision has shown, there are times when “cultural” issues can give Democrats powerful arguments to make that reach across class lines. As climate change worsens, it could become another such issue.

While there is no simple formula for the Democratic Party to win back a majority of the white working class, it could certainly do a better job of showing those voters that the Republicans, who are still favored by plutocrats and corporations, aren’t really on their side. If they can be convinced that a billionaire con artist from New York is the tribune of downscale heartland folk, anything should be possible.