Noam Scheiber

I do think there's some truth to that.

If you look at research on when college grads started moving to the left, it does start to happen around 2004, a few years before the Great Recession.

But you actually see a much, much sharper movement to the left after the Great Recession.

So I think the most intuitive reading of the research is that there was some kind of cultural politics that was pushing college grads to the left,

in 2008.

It's just hard to overstate how destabilizing the Great Recession was for American politics.

It is absolutely the case that since about 2012, we've seen this so-called diploma divide open up where college grads tend to vote for the Democrat and people without a degree tend to vote for the Republican.

That gap has gotten larger since then.

But one thing that you have to keep in mind is that actually on economic issues, on whether you want to tax the rich or whether you support unions or if you think the government should have a big role in health care or in regulating other industries.

People who graduated from college and people who didn't have actually been moving closer and closer together over the past 20 years.

What we really see is that these elections just haven't been fought on those issues.

They've largely been fought on cultural issues, issues like diversity or LGBTQ rights or immigration and race.

And on those issues, you tend to see this big divide between college grads and non-grads.

What's interesting is that even on this subset of issues, college grads and non-grads are not living in two completely different universes.

So we saw that during the Biden years, for example, college grads actually moved closer to non-grads on immigration.

They became much more skeptical of immigration.

much more restrictionist, and their voting preferences really started to come closer to people without a degree.

We saw something similar with crime, where in the 2010s, people with degrees were not very concerned about crime while people with degrees were very concerned.

But by the 2024 election,

they had moved much more closely toward where people without a degree were.