A friend e-mailed me this chart earlier today.
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What's interesting to me is that for decades I assumed that conservatism in general appealed to the less well educated, and vice versa with liberalism. Well, that was not true as of 2010. In 2010, those with high school or less were considerably more likely to be democrats. Well, now in 2020, that has flipped entirely, as with all other categories of education. Also, polling data shows that after being white (i.e. race) low education was the single most predictive factor in voting for Trump. Remember when Trump said "I love poorly educated voters?" He had good reason.
Trump has clearly lured poorly educated democrats while sending well educated republicans fleeing to the other side. The obvious conclusion is that Trump's brand of know-nothingism, which seems to be the general direction of the republican party right now, is incompatible with being knowledgeable about the world and thinking critically, which are both products of higher education.
The conservative counter-narrative is that college brainwashes people into liberalism because of its "liberal bias." But that assertion has been made for decades. It was being made when college educated people were evenly split between the two parties. So it is clearly incorrect. The problem for the educated wasn't conservatism per se. It is Trump's noxious brand of it, which is fast taking over the entire American right.
What do we do about this? It seems a lack of higher education leaves people vulnerable to being duped by Trump and this insane conservative propaganda. Maybe Bernie's idea of free college for all is something we really need to look at, in spite of its high price tag.
