The Origins of the Diploma Divide

Grossman and Hopkins argue that education polarization over the last two decades has caused the most significant shift in partisan voting since the Republican takeover of formerly Democratic Southern strongholds in the wake of the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s.

For much of the post-WWII era, most voters supported Democrats because the party offered policies that would materially improve the lives of working-class Americans. Indeed, up until 2004, the main reason voters gave for supporting the Democratic Party was that it represented working people. The opposite was true of college-educated voters, who were more likely to be affluent and attracted to the Republicans’ economic conservativism.

Starting during the presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party came to be viewed less as the party of the little guy and more as the spokesperson for coastal elites and defender of progressive cultural values. In turn, many voters came to see the Republican Party less as the party of big business and economic conservatism and more as the party of opposition to the cultural and political establishment. These overlapping shifts drove many Americans without a college degree out of the Democratic tent, from which they felt culturally alienated, while pushing college-educated voters away from the Republicans, who they increasingly saw as reactionary, backward looking, and hostile to American institutions.

Though the movement of non-college-educated voters away from the Democratic Party goes back as early as the 1960s, the “diploma divide” began to take shape in the early 2000s. By 2020, the phenomenon was impossible to deny. A gap in Democratic Party identification of over 20 percentage points opened up between voters with a college degree and those with just a high-school diploma, and a nearly 45-point gulf separated voters with a postgraduate degree from those with a high-school qualification.

What Caused the Diploma Divide?

Grossman and Hopkins’s argument is that growth in educational attainment among the mass public in the post-WWII era — a phenomenon that occurred across the industrialized world — led to the emergence of a powerful liberal college-educated political constituency. This group has slowly reshaped the electorate and worked its way through the mainstream cultural, educational, and economic institutions of American society.

Scholars have documented a wide range of changes in societies that become more college educated, including an increase in individuals holding a technocratic worldview and those with liberal cultural attitudes. And since college-educated people are also more likely to be politically active, the realm of politics has increasingly become the preserve of the well-educated.

These changes have allowed college-educated Americans to exert tremendous influence in US culture and institutions. But there are simply not enough of them to counter the cultural backlash of those without a college degree, who view the increasing influence of college-educated voters — with their liberal, technocratic worldview — as a threat to traditional values and the American way of life.

This conflict, Grossman and Hopkins argue, is at the root of the diploma divide. Politicians seeking to respond to changing voter preferences also served to exacerbate educational divides by stoking the flames of cultural resentment. The dominant interpretation of the recent election results, which focuses on racial resentment, fails to capture this nuance.

Liberal Resentment

Grossman and Hopkins take issue with the notion that the “racial resentment” of downwardly mobile working-class white voters was a central cause of educational polarization. While they acknowledge research conducted in the wake of the 2016 election showing that noncollege whites’ conservative views on race and gender seem to have played a larger short-term role in determining why these voters supported Donald Trump compared to previous Republican presidential candidates, they do not agree that Trump’s racial appeals were singularly responsible for his popularity. Scholars instead note that many voters’ sense of economic anxiety likely made them more open to Trump’s reactionary racial and gender positions in the first place.

Further, while Trump’s dog whistles certainly raised the salience of cultural issues in the minds of many voters, so too did the Democrats’ pivot toward progressive cultural values, not just in the party itself but also in the media, academia, and even the corporate world. Polarized by Degrees argues that both Republicans and Democrats were to blame for heightening the salience of divisive cultural issues in American politics. In turn, college-educated voters, who were horrified by Trump’s attacks on minorities and liberal institutions, bolted from the Republicans, while noncollege-educated voters who couldn’t stomach what they saw as the Democrats’ capitulation to the so-called woke left turned to Trump.

Grossman and Hopkins note that these trends have been concentrated among whites without a college degree. But, the authors note, Democrats should be wary of assuming that minority voters will vote blue just because they reject Trump’s ethnonationalism. Many non-white voters without a college degree could be attracted to Trump’s plainspoken style, not necessarily because what he says appeals to their material interests, but because he represents a cultural identity opposed to the dominant liberal-technocratic one.

In a prescient passage, Grossman and Hopkins warn that since the percentage of minority groups without a college degree is much higher than that among whites, if these groups — particularly Latinos — continue to move toward Republicans it can be a real problem for the Democrats. They further note that what’s keeping many Latinos and black voters in the Democratic fold is group ties and loyalty rather than policies, and that this loyalty may erode if the party continues its current course of appealing primarily to well-to-do educated liberals.

Two weeks on from the election, it’s hard to disagree with Grossman and Hopkins’s analysis. The election saw a large shift toward Trump among non-white voters — particularly Latino men. It seems increasingly unlikely that nostalgia for a bygone age of white dominance is driving many new voters to Trump. Rather educational polarization — that is, class — is a major part of the story.

Liberal Takeover of the Institutions

Grossman and Hopkins contend that another major factor driving educational polarization is the increasingly prominent role of liberal ideas in mainstream cultural institutions, from the media and academy to the corporate boardroom. Conservatives are not wrong when they claim that liberals have taken over America’s major cultural institutions. Unlike right-wing conspiracies about the nefarious influence of “cultural Marxism,” however, they explain that the increasing prominence of liberal and progressive ideas in mainstream cultural institutions has a decidedly more prosaic explanation.

Rather than a small cadre of Marxists taking over universities from within, institutions like universities have, over time, simply pivoted to reflect the increasing demand for liberal ideas among their students and faculty. Likewise, as the share of the college-educated population has grown, the audience for mainstream media has increasingly come from the professional classes, to whom the media increasingly caters.

And just as the demand for liberal ideas has grown within institutions, so too has the supply of highly educated liberals to staff those institutions. From government officials to corporate executives and even union bureaucrats, the employees and leaders of America’s most venerable institutions are increasingly drawn from the highly educated, and the percentage of people in these groups that do not have a college degree has dropped dramatically over the past several decades. As these changes have occurred, institutional cultures have shifted to align more closely with the liberal values and worldview that permeate both the personnel who run institutions as well as the clients, students, and customers they serve.

One of the clearest and most important examples of the inexorable liberal march through the institutions is the rise of the nonprofit-industrial complex. Grossman and Hopkins note that today there are more nonprofit employees in the US than there are manufacturing workers, around three million as of 2023. And public relations personnel makes up the largest share of the nonprofit workforce — a group that holds both very liberal political views as well as disproportionate media influence.

As a result, since the 2010s there has been a marked increase in major media and cultural institutions’ employment of the language of academic-flavored culturally progressive terminology, and in nonprofits’ explicit emphasis on progressive values. These trends, they argue, have accelerated to the point that nonprofits “have become part of the extended Democratic network as their educated and expertise-driven administrators and employees have overwhelmingly sided with the party in its battles with the populist-styled Republican opposition.”

Not surprisingly, all these trends have caused many Americans without a college degree to feel alienated from mainstream cultural and media organizations, and trust in major cultural institutions among this group has cratered while the opposite has happened among college-educated Americans, further fueling the diploma divide. The Right has tried to build its own institutions — they’ve been most successful in building pipelines of conservative judges through the Federalist Society and conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

But according to Grossman and Hopkins, there just isn’t as much demand or supply for intellectual output on the Right, which limits conservatives’ influence in media and academic institutions, and forces Republican politicians to draw from a narrow bench of expert knowledge in policy debates. “As a result,” Grossman and Hopkins report, “less than 1 percent of the expert community accounts for one-quarter of expert testimony in Congress.”

The Missing Link: Deindustrialization and the Decline of Unions

Grossman and Hopkins touch on a range of other important factors driving the diploma divide, from geographic and social sorting that has led to greater geographic distance between classes and decreased the chance that individuals with different educational backgrounds will encounter each other in associations or friend groups, to the global trend of dealignment observed by scholars like Thomas Piketty — which Grossman and Hopkins believe is particularly acute in the United States due to the nature of our two-party system.

One critical factor largely left out of the book’s narrative, however, is deindustrialization and the decline of unions in the United States. The impact that these events — and the Democratic Party’s failure to address them meaningfully — have had on pushing Americans without a college degree toward the Right, while largely not affecting more highly educated Americans is significant, although Polarized by Degrees gives these phenomena little attention. Decades of economic stagnation and declining economic opportunities in “left behind” areas of the country has bred intensifying resentment and mistrust of government, which has led many Americans without a college degree to stick a finger up to the establishment and look for populist alternatives. Seeing few or none from the left side of the political spectrum — Bernie Sanders notwithstanding — they looked to Trump.

It is true that this resentment often shows up in surveys as racial resentment or anti-immigrant sentiment, but as Matthew Rhodes-Purdy, Rachel Navarre, and Stephen Utych have compellingly argued, “economic discontent, driven by long-term economic change…is often the root cause of [anti-establishment] . . . discontent . . . [but] economic discontent does its work not by directly triggering . . . discontent but by turning up the heat on whatever cultural conflicts are relevant in a given context.”

In turn, as Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol have shown, the declining presence of unions in communities most strongly affected by deindustrialization — combined, as Grossman and Hopkins show, with collapsing trust in mainstream media institutions — has meant that voters without a college degree often have access to few, if any, trustworthy counternarratives. This in turn increases their skepticism of, and resentment toward, liberal institutions and politicians.

Give Economic Populism a Try!

So why don’t Democrats work to change their party brand and transform themselves back into the party of the working class? On the face of it, this seems like the obvious solution to reaching some of the alienated noncollege educated voters who just helped to deliver a decisive victory to Donald Trump. Trump — at least in 2016 — was highly effective in tapping into workers’ economic anxiety and related cultural resentment toward liberal elites, but the substance of his economic policies to help workers was fool’s gold.

By contrast, Joe Biden’s economic policies — though woefully inadequate to put struggling families back on track — did help working Americans. But neither he nor Kamala Harris packed anything close to the populist punch that makes Trump so viscerally relatable to many pissed off working people.

So why don’t the Democrats take a page from the populist playbook and lean into attacks on out-of-touch cultural and economic elites while maintaining a sharp policy focus on economic policies that will help to rebuild the Rust Belt and beyond?

Grossman and Hopkins are skeptical. They assert that “shifting . . . [the Party’s] emphasis back to economic redistribution would not protect Democratic leaders from being attacked for excessive liberalism or suffering from the thermostatic backlash to new economic policy enactments.” In other words, shifting the party’s focus to economics would not necessarily do anything to alter its association with cultural values and positions that are outside the mainstream of working-class America. The very policies Democrats would have to enact to help the working-class would likely cause a short-term backlash against government overreach and profligate spending — much as the Affordable Care Act did — that would only serve to intensify the diploma divide. Biden-Harris already tried a sweeping change of this kind, and they failed spectacularly to stop the bleeding of working-class voters in 2024.

Polarized by Degrees offers a serious challenge to those who believe economic populism is likely to be Democrats’ only salvation in the age of Trump and beyond. Yet it misses at least three key points: first, not all economic policies designed to improve the material well-being of working people are created equal. Their capacity for generating electoral rewards and minimizing backlash differ greatly. For instance, while Medicare for All would produce long-term gains for working people, it would inevitably produce a short- to medium-term backlash due to job losses in the medical insurance industry and the inflation that a huge increase in demand for medical services would likely entail.

By contrast, policies focused on creating or improving jobs and revitalizing the economic life of left-behind communities would certainly face strong opposition from Republicans before passage — since they would come with a hefty price tag and would require tax hikes on the rich — but could lead to meaningful and visible improvements in the lives of American workers without disrupting existing jobs or generating substantial inflationary pressures. These policies include massive new community-led infrastructure and community revitalization grants to left-behind communities that allow for local experimentation and community involvement, large-scale investments in job retraining programs to match workers with the skills they need, and a historic expansion of industrial policy to reshore American jobs across a broad range of sectors, particularly in geographic areas facing the most severe economic decline.

Beyond the specific policies, however, Democrats would need to make an economic-populist pitch to working-class Americans that felt credible and left no doubt about who was responsible for the policies being implemented. They would need to dramatically reshape their image to transform themselves into the party of the average American common fighting against greedy corporations and out-of-touch cultural elites. Given the Democratic Party’s current dependence on highly-educated voters and extremely wealthy donors, this shift will be a tall order indeed.

But in the wake of their recent electoral thrashing, and given the fact that Democratic candidates who leaned into economics and distanced themselves from the party’s elitist image substantially outperformed Harris’s margins, Democratic candidates may become more receptive to economic populist messaging. Republicans will continue to make inroads with working-class voters unless more Democrats learn how to connect with those voters on an organic, visceral, and emotional level to show they understand where working people are at, how pissed off they’ve become with politics as usual, and that the party is going to do something about it.

Finally, however, the changes needed for Democrats to turn the tide of the diploma divide — a process decades in the making — will require time and many short-term setbacks. This is a generational project more than a specific strategy for the 2028 or 2032 elections. We need to build a populist movement worthy of its name — unlike MAGA — that is by and for American workers, and that can finally take back our country from the grip of decades of corporate dominance in both parties.