ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
In the last few election cycles, voters have split along a fault line that didn't used to be a big deal in American politics. It's a new divide that's growing, and we'll find out just how quickly in a couple of weeks when election results come in. NPR senior political editor and correspondent to Domenico Montanaro is here to explain this realignment and what it could mean for the presidential race. Hey, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, Ari. Good to be with you.
SHAPIRO: Big reveal - what's the divide we're talking about?
MONTANARO: Well, we're talking about the education line, and whether or not you have a college degree seems to be one of the biggest predictors of how you're going to vote. If you have a college degree, more likely than not, you're voting Democratic. If you don't, more likely than not now, you're voting Republican. And that's a pretty big shift from what we had seen, you know, in the 1980s or '90s, even the early 2000s.
SHAPIRO: Yeah, I mean, for context, like, if you reach back to the '80s or '90s, we see a split along generational lines that is more or less consistent with today. Older people tend to be more conservative. We back then saw a split along racial lines that more or less applies today - nonwhite people more likely to vote Democratic. If you look back to the late 20th century, was there much of a divide at all on education?
MONTANARO: It wasn't as big as what we've seen moving into, you know, the early part of the 21st century. Like, I would say in 2008, you know, President Obama - then-candidate Barack Obama - won voters without college degrees by seven points, 53 to 46. By 2016, there had been a 14-point swing...
SHAPIRO: Wow.
MONTANARO: ...When Donald Trump came on the scene, where Trump won them 51-44. And that is really a time, I think, '08 and into 2010, with the rise of the Tea Party, where we really started to see more of the sort of populism on the right that started to shift things.
SHAPIRO: OK. So that gets to the reason for this shift. Like, is it Trump? Is it MAGA politics? Is it something Democrats did to lose less educated voters? What's the reason?
MONTANARO: Obviously, Trump is a big reason for the shift. He appealed to white voters without degrees, first and foremost, from a cultural standpoint. He blamed immigrants for crime and economic issues. He blamed elites for making them forgotten men and women. And they were vulnerable to that message with a right-wing information ecosystem that's been pushing these same kinds of messages for a couple of decades now, that especially took hold during the presidency of Barack Obama, the first Black president. At the same time, you have an economy that's fundamentally shifted to favor white-collar jobs in cities rather than blue-collar jobs in more rural areas. There was a lot of kindling there for resentment and grievance that Trump homed in on, even shifting Republican policy on trade to be more protectionist.
SHAPIRO: On the flip side, the reverse is also true, that people with college degrees, who might have in the past voted for Republicans, are now voting for Democrats. Why is that happening?
MONTANARO: Yeah, and once again, I think that's related to Donald Trump, as so much of our politics have been since 2015 and 2016. Just to kind of underscore how sharp this divide has been, white voters with college degrees voted for Trump in 5 of the 7 swing states that we're now mostly talking about. We're talking about, you know, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan in the blue wall states in the upper Midwest, and North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada in those Sun Belt states. In those states, 5 of the 7, Trump won white voters with college degrees. That flipped in 2020 big time - 6 of those 7 states, white voters with college degrees went for Joe Biden. And I think a lot of that has to do with one, how Trump handled the pandemic, certainly, but also how he governed, how he was as president. You know, a lot of people that we talked to in 2016, they didn't quite see what the chaos would be.
SHAPIRO: Although, if I'm not mistaken, in some of those key swing states, there's a disproportionate number of white voters without college degrees.
MONTANARO: That's true. In all three of those blue wall states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, you have white voters without college degrees who make up the majority of the eligible voters. Now, it's down from a even higher percentage that it was, you know, 10, 15 years ago, but still a majority, and which is a reason why Republicans have been able to put those three states in play when they had been more so Democratic states because those voters have now moved so overwhelmingly toward Republicans.
SHAPIRO: So who's getting the better end of the swap here, Democrats or Republicans? If they're each trading voters who used to be with the other party, is it better to be a Democrat getting these college-educated voters or better to be a Republican getting these less-educated voters?
MONTANARO: I think it's a big test in this election for sure. I mean, you know, overall, Democrats, you know, have won 7 of the last 8 popular votes. But this country doesn't elect presidents through the popular vote. They do it through the electoral college, and those electoral college states, you know, are a little bit more conservative than the country writ large. And in that way, that's benefited Republicans. On the other hand, in the Sun Belt states that are emerging, you have more diversity, and you have an increase in white, college-educated populations across the board in those seven states. And Democrats are benefiting. So I think we're going to see a big test in this election of how this education divide affects things, but it's certainly had a huge impact on our politics, this realignment and policies.
SHAPIRO: NPR's Domenico Montanaro, thanks a lot.
MONTANARO: Hey - you're welcome.
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