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cover of episode How the ‘Diploma Divide’ Polarizes the U.S. Electorate

How the ‘Diploma Divide’ Polarizes the U.S. Electorate

2024/12/31
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Guy Marzarati: 学历差距是塑造美国政治最重要的因素,大学学历选民转向民主党,而无大学学历选民转向共和党。这一趋势在2024年大选中尤为明显,学历差距甚至超过了性别差距。加州选举中的一些结果也反映了这一趋势,例如民主党总统候选人在奥兰治县获胜但在内陆帝国失利。 David Hopkins: 美国两党在全国层面势均力敌,但大学学历选民向民主党转移,而无大学学历选民向共和党转移,这造成了党派政治的重大变化。学历差距的主要驱动力是文化议题在党派政治中的日益重要性,取代了传统的经济利益基础。无大学学历者往往比有大学学历者更保守,这在所有种族群体中都是如此。少数族裔选民如果开始基于文化价值观而非经济利益投票,他们中相当一部分人会转向共和党。

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Key Insights

What is the 'diploma divide' and how is it shaping American politics?

The 'diploma divide' refers to the growing political polarization in the U.S. based on educational attainment. Voters with college degrees are increasingly aligning with the Democratic Party, while those without degrees are shifting toward the Republican Party. This divide is driving significant shifts in party constituencies and is a key factor in the polarization of American politics, influencing election outcomes and cultural debates.

How did the diploma divide play out in the 2024 presidential election?

In the 2024 presidential election, the diploma divide continued to grow, with college-educated voters favoring Kamala Harris and non-college-educated voters supporting Donald Trump. Notably, this divide extended beyond white voters, with significant portions of non-white voters without degrees also moving toward the Republican Party, marking a broader trend across racial groups.

Why are non-college-educated voters increasingly aligning with the Republican Party?

Non-college-educated voters are increasingly aligning with the Republican Party due to cultural and social conservatism. These voters tend to hold more traditional values and are less trusting of institutions like universities and the media. As cultural issues have become central to party politics, these voters are drawn to the Republican Party's emphasis on patriotism and traditional values.

How has the historical alignment of college-educated voters changed over time?

Historically, college-educated voters were more likely to be Republicans, as they were part of the upper strata of society with white-collar jobs. However, this trend reversed in recent decades, with college-educated voters now predominantly aligning with the Democratic Party. This shift reflects broader changes in cultural values and the increasing importance of education in shaping political identity.

What role do cultural issues play in the diploma divide?

Cultural issues are a major driver of the diploma divide. College-educated voters tend to be more socially liberal, supporting progressive values like gender equality and LGBTQ rights, while non-college-educated voters are more socially conservative. This cultural divide has become a central factor in party alignment, with Democrats championing progressive cultural values and Republicans appealing to traditionalism.

How does the diploma divide affect trust in institutions and expertise?

The diploma divide significantly affects trust in institutions and expertise. College-educated voters are more likely to trust experts and institutions like universities and the media, while non-college-educated voters are more distrustful. This divide is exacerbated by the perception that experts and institutions are ideologically aligned with the left, fueling a populist backlash against expertise.

What are the implications of the diploma divide for future elections?

The diploma divide has significant implications for future elections. While college-educated voters are more likely to turn out in midterm and local elections, non-college-educated voters still make up the majority of the electorate. Both parties must address the concerns of non-college-educated voters to avoid electoral consequences, as ignoring this group could lead to significant shifts in political power.

How has the Republican Party's approach to higher education changed due to the diploma divide?

The Republican Party has become less supportive of higher education funding and accessibility as the diploma divide has grown. With college-educated voters increasingly aligning with Democrats, Republicans have shifted their focus away from supporting state university systems and scholarships, reflecting a broader partisan divide on education policy.

Why do some Democrats struggle to connect with non-college-educated voters?

Some Democrats struggle to connect with non-college-educated voters due to a perceived condescension from educated liberals. Many non-college-educated voters feel looked down upon by those with degrees, leading to resentment and a rejection of Democratic policies. This dynamic is exacerbated by the cultural and social divide between the two groups.

How does the diploma divide compare to global political trends?

The diploma divide is not unique to the U.S. and reflects broader global trends. Many countries are experiencing similar polarization based on education, with educated voters supporting progressive, globalized policies and non-educated voters favoring populist, nationalist movements. This trend is driven by globalizing, secularizing, and technocratic changes, as well as the backlash against these changes.

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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Guy Marzarati in for Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, when historians look back on 2024, they may very well see the diploma divide as the most important dynamic shaping politics in our country. Voters with college degrees shifting toward the Democratic Party, while voters without college degrees increasingly across all racial and ethnic groups moving to the right.

In his new book, Polarized by Degrees, David Hopkins argues the diploma divide is driving, quote, the most significant shifts in party constituencies in at least a generation. We'll talk with Hopkins about what these new fault lines in American society mean for elections. That's next after this news.

This is Forum. I'm Guy Marzarati and for me, Nakim. The results of this year's election may have confirmed that the most important division in American politics is between voters with and without a college degree. You have to take exit polls and surveys with a big grain of salt, but here's what the Associated Press found. In the presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the so-called diploma divide was actually larger than the much-discussed gender gap.

This political reshuffling along educational lines could explain results here in California this year that would have seemed shocking just a decade ago, like a Democratic presidential candidate winning Orange County but losing across the Inland Empire.

This hour, we'll talk about the political dividing line of educational attainment with David Hopkins, associate professor of political science at Boston College and co-author of the very timely new book, Polarized by Degrees, How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. David, thanks so much for being with us and Happy New Year.

Thanks, Guy. Happy New Year to you, too. So you're writing about this era we're in in U.S. politics where we have close election after close election. We have what seems like these entrenched partisan loyalties, the same handful of swing states every four years, so-called calcified politics. But you argue with your co-author, Matt Grossman, that there's actually a really important realignment happening in American politics right now.

That's right. We're in an era where the two parties at the national level are very evenly balanced. And so we're seeing both in congressional and presidential elections, very close elections and power going back and forth. But that doesn't mean that every individual voter is entrenched on one side or the other of the party gap. And one of the most important things

engines of change in our party politics right now is the sort of simultaneous shift of voters with college degrees from the Republicans, where they used to mostly congregate, into the Democratic Party and the countervailing movement of voters without degrees from the Democrats to the Republicans. And so while there looks like a lot of stability at the national level, once you sort of look below the surface, you see an awful lot of change happening.

And this is a trend that we've now seen in a few consecutive presidential elections. Based on what we know happened in November, I know we got to wait for the surveys of validated voters. We just have kind of exit polls at this point. But based on what you've seen that happened in November, did this kind of diploma divide continue? And how did it play out between Trump and Harris?

Yes, it did continue. And the important thing that is particularly notable about this election is we really started for the first time to see pretty convincing evidence that the diploma divide is not just happening among white voters. Up to this point, it had been a mostly white phenomenon and that non-white voters were

tended to be mostly Democrats regardless of their educational status, but I think you can see very clearly from both the survey results and some of the geographic results in this last election, it's pretty clear we're starting to see the diploma divide move across all racial groups and in particular that means the many voters of color who do not have college degrees are

used to be strongly Democrats. Now, a certain significant portion of them are starting to move towards the Republicans. Yeah, you have it as an open question. I think your book published in the fall, you have it as this open question. Could the diploma divide extend to racial minorities? Are you surprised it did in such a way in twenty twenty four?

Not surprised. I think we were in the book. You know, we didn't want to necessarily make a firm prediction because American politics can go in ways you don't expect. But we we sort of hinted that we wouldn't be surprised if we started to see that same trend happen because.

One of the main driving forces of the diploma divide is the increasing centrality of cultural issues and cultural debates to party politics, sort of supplanting the traditional economic interest basis of the party system.

And what we know from survey data and other kinds of evidence is that people without college degrees tend to be more socially and culturally conservative than people with college degrees. And that is true among all racial groups. It's not only true of white voters. And so if...

among minority voters, if they started to vote on the basis of their cultural values as opposed to their economic interests, we would predict that a certain significant percentage of them would start moving into the Republican Party. And so that's...

in some sense, just an echo of the existing pattern that we already were seeing among white voters. Yeah, this is a conversation we've had in California talking about the Latino electorate. Like, is this about, as you say, voters with conservative values

just not voting for Democrats anymore. Don't matter what race, like conservatives are just not voting for Democrats. Some also say this is perhaps a story of assimilation of newer generations as they come along in the way that like Italian and Irish voters stopped voting as an ethnic bloc at some point. Does that kind of ring true at all for you? Yeah, I think one of the things we knew about about

the politics of Latinos and Asian-American voters is that one of the things that kept them in the Democratic Party, despite their differences with the leadership of the Democratic Party over cultural issues, was a sort of sense that their own of identity with their own ethnic group and the sort of belief that their own ethnic group was kind of at a systematic disadvantage. And the Democrats were the party that cared about, you know, integration and acceptance and tolerance and diversity.

But once you start, you know, as the sort of the generations go on, once you start feeling less alienated from larger American society, you're less aware.

you know, maybe less attracted to the Democratic Party for those reasons. And so just as a hundred years ago, the Irish voted Democratic because they sort of saw the Republicans as hostile to the integration of Irish people into mainstream American culture. So too, up to this point, many Latinos and Asians have had Democratic loyalties that sort of exist separate from their cultural beliefs and values.

And the more they feel comfortable and accepted by mainstream American culture, the less they may be motivated to vote on that basis. And they may be more attracted to a Republican Party that presents itself as sort of the party of patriotism and the party of traditional values. So in your book, you track this voting behavior of college graduates, non-college graduates throughout the 20th century. What did you find historically about kind of where these groups had been landing politically?

Well, really, traditionally, the education divide went the other direction. And up until very recently, that was the case really for all of American history. If you if you graduated from college, especially a four year college, you were very likely to be a Republican.

And that sort of made a certain sense in an age where the dominant difference between the party was sort of class and economic differences. People with college degrees, of course, it used to be pretty unusual to have a college degree. You were sort of at the upper strata of American society almost by definition, if you did, until the last generation or so. And those people tended to be more prosperous. They tended to have more white-collar professional jobs. They tended to...

obviously be heavily white and male. And that was sort of one of the bases of the Republican Party, the sort of the white collar, suburban, highly educated electorate, whereas it was the Democrats that were the party of the people without degrees, the sort of the working class. And

So the the diploma divide used to be a divide in the opposite direction. And we sort of went through a brief period where it wasn't clearly delineated between the parties. And now we're in an age where it's very much, you know, going more and more in the in the in the corner.

current, you know, the sort of current pattern where more and more people with degrees are more attracted to the Democrats and people without the Republicans. But this is really a sort of exception if we look at the grand sweep of American history for the education divide to be aligned with the parties in this particular sense. So

So that would seem to suggest that it's not college itself maybe being a liberalizing force, like what you're teaching those kids at BC. Like, is this maybe something that's happening as a social group as a whole? That's right. You know, there's a lot of interest and understandably so in the question of whether it's the college experience itself that inculcates students with liberal political opinions. And a lot of people believe that that is true, especially a lot of conservative people.

tend to believe that that's true. That's their explanation for why college-educated people are more liberal is that they've sort of been brainwashed on campus by their professors or the university administration or something like that. But there's not a lot of evidence that that's actually the case. Most students who go to college do not change their politics that much while they're on campus.

And the diploma divide that we see is not primarily driven by recent college graduates. We see a lot of people who years after and even decades after they attended college themselves,

Changing parties, college educated people, for example, who happily voted for George Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney. Once Donald Trump came along, became alienated from the Republican Party and the direction, the populist direction, the Republican Party was taken and some amount of them, significant amount of them became Joe Biden voters. And so we shouldn't.

I think, confuse the roots of the diploma divide with necessarily what's happening on campus. We should remember that earning a college education really changes the entire course of your life. And it means you have a different kind of job. It means you live in a different kind of neighborhood. It affects that you are likely to marry somebody of the same educational status of yourself. It means that your co-workers and your friends and your friends

And your neighbors are likely to be of the same educational stratum as yourself. And it changes things like even what kind of media you consume and how you think about government and how you think about about politics and how much trust you put into expert, you know, sort of expert governance.

And so it's too simple to say it's all a story about your four years on campus. It's really a story of what kind of life you lead and what kind of person you are and what kind of values and priorities you have. And that separates you as a college graduate to a large degree from your fellow citizens who did not have the same opportunity to attend college. And we're coming up on a break, but it sounds like this is something playing out around the world too, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So we're heading into a break. When we come back, we're going to continue our conversation with David Hopkins about this diploma divide in American politics and why he's ready to call a winner in our national culture wars over abortion, gender identity and more. Plus, we'll take your calls. Stay with us. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award winning director Casey Nicholaw.

Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit. Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th.

Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Guy Marzarati and for Mina Kim, we're talking about the diploma divide in American politics, voters with college degrees moving toward the Democratic Party and those without moving toward the GOP. Our guest is David Hopkins, Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College and the author of Polarized by Degrees, How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics and

And we want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on this realignment that we're seeing in US elections? How do you think your education has shaped your life, where you live, what you do, who you vote for? What role does trust in institutions play in your vote?

You can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org or find us on social media platforms. We're on X, we're on Facebook, Instagram, at KQED Forum. Or give us a call now, 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786.

So, David, in this political sphere, we've seen Democrats, Republicans locked in this ongoing fight over social issues. I mentioned reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights. But you're ready to wave it off. You argue there has been a clear winner in the culture wars. Well, yeah.

We'll say we say in the book, in the in a general sense, the culture has moved in the more in the direction of the left than the right over the past 40 years or so of American history. My co-author, Matt Grossman, and I are old enough to remember the 1980s and 80s.

even based on our own personal experience, we can very much testify what a relatively conservative time that was compared to today. And then a lot of changing social norms that used to be very controversial, the idea of, for example, women in the workplace used to be a very controversial issue. Certainly LGBT acceptance was nothing in those years like it is now.

We have a more globalized world. We have a world where education values are, education status is rising. More people are going to college and earning degrees than ever before in history. We have an increasingly diverse, racially diverse and otherwise diverse mass public in this country and many other countries around the world. So the overall trend of American society

has been mostly in a liberal direction and our argument is when conservatives sort of lament social change and point back to the past as a time that was more conservative, they've got a point. They're correct about that to a large degree. Now that doesn't mean that policy always follows the direction of the left. Obviously abortion policy is a good example of this where the right has made gains but

in a wider scope, the sort of the overall drift and direction of cultural norms, values, practices in our society and most Western societies, it's moved in the direction of the left. And so the kind of populist backlash that we see, obviously in this country, but in many other countries around the world,

It maybe shouldn't be such a shock. We maybe should have kind of seen that coming a little bit because it is a reaction to real change that we're seeing in the world around us. And how did it happen? How did this kind of cultural liberalism gain such a wide foothold?

Well, one of the things that has happened is that we are seeing, you know, the educated sector of society that has disproportionate cultural power, that has leadership over major social institutions like our educational system, our media industry, much of corporate America, certainly the nonprofit world.

They themselves have internalized and promoted a lot of relatively politically progressive values. And they have sort of been the thought leaders in society at large, moving policies but also norms and ideas in the direction favored by cultural progressives. And so that's, I think, the main thing.

kind of engine of change has been that people with cultural influence were persuaded of these values, of the ideas about gender equality and racial equality and sexual orientation equality, for example. And they have then promoted those values and set the institutional rules along those lines that then have guided everybody else.

And how permanent a victory do you see this as for liberals on these social issues? Because as you all point out in the book, like there was plenty of social change in the 60s and 70s that was then followed by the Reagan years of kind of greater cultural conservatism. So are these solid gains? Is this a trend you expect to continue to?

Yeah, it's hard for us to predict the future. We're very reluctant to do that. Unfortunately, you know, a Ph.D. doesn't come with a crystal ball. It would be great if we could do it. But yeah.

We do think that it's occurred over a long enough period of time that it's hard to imagine sort of fully reversing any of those changes. It's hard to imagine the circumstance on which we sort of go back to the 1950s or even the 1980s in this country. A lot of these cultural values have been broadly accepted.

even by people who aren't particularly liberal. They have sort of accepted and gone along with many of these changes, though not all of them. And so they're probably relatively durable. And a real change would, again, take the people with the most cultural power, the most education, the most sort of social status to change their minds about these issues. And we don't really foresee that happening at least ever.

soon. We're talking with David Hopkins, co-author of Polarized by Degrees, How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. You can join the conversation by giving us a call 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. And we're going to go to the phones with Robert in Oakland. Robert, good morning. Hi, how are you? Doing well. Thanks so much for calling in.

Hi. My comment, my question has to do with the increasing distrust by people on the right of science or even expertise in general. It's very troubling to me because

We there's an increasing percentage of people who are distrusting vaccines, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. There seems to be a rejection of anyone who has expertise on on almost any topic. And it's particularly troubling to me because when when people spend careers.

studying particular things, whether it's economics, and there have been plenty of rejections on the right of Nobel laureates who have economic degrees. It's like kicking ourselves in our...

uh... and our and our own uh... feet because uh... these people acquire knowledge that's valuable to make decisions and i'd like your guest to comment about the rejection of science and expertise for more generally

Yeah. Thank you so much, Robert. Really appreciate your call. David, what do you make of what Robert describes as a rejection of expertise? Yeah. Thanks, Robert. It's a great question. And we talk a lot about this in the book that, you know, we've we've mostly talked up till now on this program about about the cultural issues.

issues that divide the more from the less educated. But another really, really important dimension is trust in expertise. And that is, we see all this all around us in politics now also a really big partisan dividing line.

And our argument is that it's part of the same pattern. It's part of the same pattern of the difference in educational level between the two parties, that people with college degrees are just also people who are more likely to trust experts and to trust the institutions that are expert-dominated.

And we've seen this play out obviously with vaccines, as the caller said, with the COVID vaccine, but also obviously with things like environmental policy and education policy, where one side says, let's trust the experts and let's turn the powers and levers of government over to the experts to sort of set policy for the rest of us because they know best. They're the most trained, they're the most scientific, and they're the ones who are going to generate the best policy.

and then you see this populist backlash distrust against the experts and

Of course, there's nothing new about intellectuals, you know, not being popular with regular people. But but there's a partisan dimension to it that's that's very new. And part of the fodder for that is the perception that these experts are not just being neutral in and in empirical in their policy, but that they they themselves have an ideological agenda.

And, you know, you could see, for example, during the COVID era where there was a controversy over, you know, over social distancing and masking and things like that and experts saying everybody should stay home and they should, you know, keep their distance from from everybody else and they shouldn't congregate in big groups in public. But then when the.

Black Lives Matter protests started to happen in the spring and summer of 2020, a lot of public health experts did not discourage those protests. And they didn't say that, well, people should stay home and not congregate. They said, oh, no, you know, police brutality is a social justice issue. And some of them even endorsed those protests. And so the fact that a lot of people with

scientific credentials are overwhelmingly on the left and do share the values of cultural progressivism does sort of play into, to some degree, the backlash that they then face on the right. Has it in your mind reshaped some of those institutions where, you know, Americans with degrees work? Absolutely. I think, you know, a lot of people who are, you

If you're employed in an educational institution or a mainstream media institution or you work at a nonprofit, you probably have a workplace where the dominant political climate is left of center, and especially left of center on cultural issues.

And that's not I mean, that's not a myth. That is certainly my experience. And it's the experience, I think, of of of many people. And so when conservatives distrust these institutions and see them as kind of politically hostile territory, they're not entirely wrong. Of course, conservatives, as the caller alludes to, run their own risk because just if just because you

see the experts as being on the other side from you politically and don't want to believe what they say doesn't mean that they aren't right about the science. You

you know, the experts aren't right all the time, but the people who criticize their experts aren't right all the time either. And if you decide not to take a vaccine that might actually help protect you against a lethal disease because you think that doctors and public health professionals are a bunch of liberals and you don't trust them, you're obviously running a major risk in your own right. And so that's why there's a real tradeoff to this conservative distrust of science and expertise.

Yeah. And you also write about this, you know, in I think, as you all put it, kind of a conscious decision to lean into sowing distrust among these institutions rather than standing up alternative institutions with, you know, it's their own expertise. That's right. The conservative movement in the United States has not responded to the

dominance of some of these institutions by sort of trying to work within the system and trying to develop, for example, scientifically valid critiques of

Climate change research and that sort of thing. The dominant strategy the conservatives have used has just been to attack the institutions and the people who run them more generally from positions within the conservative infrastructure, Republicans in elective office, but also conservative think tanks, conservative media outlets and so forth.

And so we have this debate that is hard to resolve because we don't have a lot of kind of good faith engagement on both sides. We have a lot of sort of people taking shots at each other from different perches without the ability to kind of actually engage with each other and try to resolve some of their differences. I think the big exception would be the world of constitutional law, where there is this well-organized conservative movement. You do see conservative institutions that have been stood up

in this effort. What happened there? Is that a roadmap in any way for Republicans who are seeking or conservatives who are seeking to kind of contest this intellectual realm?

Yeah. So, I mean, we do mention this in the book that, you know, the conservative legal world is a kind of exception to that, where they did really engage in successful institution building, for example, the creation of the Federalist Society. And that's where they sort of saw a real immediate political payoff to do so because they were trying to get conservative judges, you know, into the judicial branch at both the federal and state levels. And so there was a very

immediate political incentive to build an institution to promote and develop conservative thought and conservative thinkers. And there was always an immediate demand from Republican presidents and governors for conservative judicial candidates. And so they were able to overcome the startup costs involved in creating their own institutions.

But we don't see that same model applied more generally to academia, for example, beyond the sort of conservative law school networks. And instead, we just see attacks on academia from outside. And that seems to be the dominant approach in most cases. It's definitely led. I mean, this whole realignment thing.

with college degrees moving towards the Democratic Party, these institutions filled by workers who have college degrees perhaps shifting left, it's led, going back to the politics, to some kind of strange dynamics. I mean, you see Democrats going out of their way to defend the FBI, Republicans battling with corporations, with Major League Baseball. Talk us through some of the examples that you've seen where this kind of diploma divide has led to some strange bedfellows.

Yeah, well, we sort of think about, again, if you go back to the 1960s and you see, you know, the politics of the left in America, not just in America, often, you know, the institutions were the enemy there. You know, previous generations of activists on the left weren't sort of defending the New York Times and Harvard University and NBC News, you know, against political attack. But what has happened over time is that, you know,

People on the left have sort of learned that there is a benefit to be gained from working within institutions and that you can achieve a lot of liberal goals, especially in the world of culture, by working within institutions.

And then on the right, of course, institutions that the right used to believe they they stood to defend, like the school system and the university system and the government agencies against the attack of radical leftists. Well, now those those same institutions, as you say, even the FBI, even the CIA, even the military in some cases is now accused of being too woke,

to, you know, to left wing for conservative tastes. And so I think what that really does is it speaks to the extent to which

for lack of a better word, and it's not a word I love to use, but for lack of a better word, the establishment, you know, or establishment institutions in American society have really accommodated liberal values in a lot of respects over the past 30 or 40 years. And how alienated conservatives have become, and now that conservatives see their main voting base as people without college degrees, people who aren't influential within these institutions, people who already are distrustful of these institutions,

then they really see a political advantage to making these institutions the target of attack rather than coming, you know, rushing to their defense. We're talking about the diploma divide, its effects on American culture and American politics with David Hopkins, associate professor of political science at Boston College and the author of Polarized by Degrees, How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.

You can join the conversation. We have a comment from Diana who writes, "Educated people are less likely to be persuaded by Fox News and other misinformation sources." You can share your thoughts on this conversation by joining us on our social channels, Blue Sky X, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. We're @KQEDForum. Or give us a call now, 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786.

We're heading into a break, and when we come back, more with David Hopkins on whether the diploma divide could set Democrats up for success in 2026. Support for Forum comes from Broadway SF and Some Like It Hot, a new musical direct from Broadway from Tony Award-winning director Casey Nicholaw. Set in Chicago during Prohibition, Some Like It Hot tells the story of two musicians forced to flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit.

Featuring Tony-winning choreography and an electrifying score, Some Like It Hot plays the Orpheum Theatre for three weeks only, January 7th through 26th. Tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com. Support for Forum comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

From wielding the power of the law to protect people's health, preserving magnificent places and wildlife, and advancing clean energy to combat climate change, Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Guy Marzarati in for Mina Kim. We're talking about the diploma divide in American politics. Voters with college degrees moving toward the Democratic Party and those without moving toward the GOP. It's been a key fault line in the last three presidential elections and our guest has written a book about it.

David Hopkins is associate professor of political science at Boston College and the co-author of Polarized by Degrees, How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. And we want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on this realignment that we're seeing in U.S. elections?

And do you agree with David that liberals have largely won the culture wars? You can email your comments and questions to forum at kqed.org. You can also find us on Blue Sky or Facebook or Instagram at KQED Forum. And give us a call now, 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786.

And we have a couple comments coming in. One listener writes, I wonder if the degree divide is driven by earning power more than ideology. If degrees correlate with income, perhaps those with degrees felt less impact from inflation. Certainly a big issue in this election, David. I mean, where do we see this idea of a diploma divide kind of dovetail from an income divide? Sure. Well, there certainly is.

correlation between education and income. And that correlation is getting stronger over time. Even though college is becoming more expensive, the additional earning power that you can expect to have over the course of your lifetime still means that for most people, getting a college degree is financially worth it. And I do think there's something to be said for the

rate of inflation and the other kind of economic problems we've had over the last couple of years falling disproportionately on people with less education. I think that that is absolutely true. On the other hand, there isn't a perfect correlation. There are people who have more success in education than they have financially and vice versa. And when we look at those sort of

Cross tabs, that's where you actually see the biggest impact.

party divide of all. People who have lots of education but don't make a lot of money are very, very heavily Democratic, and people who have lots of money but not as much education are very, very heavily Republican. And so that shows that it's not just income. The diploma divide is not just sort of an echo of an income gap. The education itself is the main driving factor in explaining the divergence between the two parties.

We're going to go to the phones and Quinn in Oakland. Quinn, good morning and thanks for calling into forum.

Good morning. As a college student in a lower middle class family, it's already hard to afford a college or university. And with the process of applying and getting everything situated, financial aid is also very difficult to navigate. And my question is, if you think it's intentional to keep

more people out and students from getting a diploma and to feed the Republicans. Interesting. Quinn, thanks so much for that call and your question. David, I don't know if you have any thoughts on what Quinn is asking. Yeah, well, I do think that we're seeing a difference, an increasing difference in the parties in their attitude towards higher ed and higher ed

accessibility in the public. And certainly the Democrats now view college students and recent graduates as a constituency they really want to court. And so, for example, Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness proposal

was very much an attempt to kind of provide a benefit to a constituency within the Democratic Party that he and other Democrats really want to court. But you also saw the conservative opposition to that. And

You really see, I think, more broadly higher ed and of course, a lot of higher ed policies made at the state level that used to be an area that was relatively free of partisanship. There used to be a lot of agreement, broad agreement between Democrats and Republicans about funding state university systems, funding scholarships and grants for disadvantaged students to make it easier for them to attend, investing in

community colleges and public universities. And now we're starting to see more and more, as the diploma divide progresses, less bipartisan agreement on all of those areas. And Republican officials in particular becoming less and less enthusiastic about supporting the financial issues

you know, funding of higher ed and college students. And so I would expect that that may likely continue, that, you know, more and more the two parties sort of see college students and college graduates as lining up on one side. And so one side wants to keep them happy, but the other side is not so interested anymore. Yeah, that'll certainly be fascinating to watch in the next four years. Back to the phones now in San Francisco. John. Hey, John, good morning. Good morning.

Yeah. Hi, Guy. Thank you. Last comment on but two quick reactions. One is I appreciate the earlier commenter who said that Democrats or the left is now focused more on truth. So they're less likely to be and the higher educated are less likely to be bamboozled by propaganda.

But in terms of the, you asked the question about who won the culture war, and I would have agreed with you probably five, ten years ago that the left had won or was winning. But given the rise of the Internet and social media, I would say we're backtracking. You look at how things are going with the focus on acceptance of trans people, gay rights seem to reach a nadir.

with Obergefell, and now it's potentially going backwards. And even on the cultural side, you look at the reaction to Bud Light and the explosion of guns and car culture on the Internet. I don't know that they won. I think maybe they won a temporary victory, but it's still unclear to me whether we've lost the war. Thanks so much. I'd like your guess to that. Yeah, thank you so much for your call, Robert. David?

Yeah, well, I think, you know, in the short term, you're going to have ebbs and flows in all of these trends. And we're not predicting that every single year looks more liberal than the year before. We're trying to take a very big picture, a broad survey of, you know, American history in a larger view. And we think that if you take that big picture, you know,

The difference in our society today compared to where it was in 1980 or 1990 or certainly 1950 is sort of undebatable. We're certainly not predicting that that will just continue going on forever either. We're not saying that, but we're saying that trying to explain our politics today

only makes sense to look at where we've come from. And that if you do that, you sort of understand that a lot of people in this country have seen an awful lot of social change over their lifetimes that has gone predominantly in one direction. Yeah, I think it's safe to say, you know, liberals have made more progress on that front than they have in presidential elections, which remain kind of coin toss affairs. Why is that? Why?

Right. Well, this is why we wanted to sort of make a distinction in the book between the electoral world where the two parties are evenly matched and collections are close and it sort of goes back and forth. And there's a kind of a stasis to the pattern and the larger society where the where the pattern is very different. The president isn't in charge of the culture.

And in fact, most of the time when you have a president of one party, public opinion starts to move in the opposite direction. That's what's known among political scientists as thermostatic public opinion. And so even if the caller is right, for example, that we're moving in a more conservative direction under Biden, well, it may be that once Trump is in there again, things will move back towards the left.

So we think it's very important to make a distinction that elections and the results of elections, of course, those are important. We're political scientists. We care a lot about those things. But they aren't the only measure of the direction of culture and society and that our political system is just a subset of these larger social trends and environments that we also think are really important that political scientists have not always paid enough attention to.

More calls coming in and you can join this conversation about the diploma divide in American politics by calling 866-733-6786. Let's go to Linda in San Francisco. Hey, Linda.

Hi, thank you for taking my call. I was the first in my working class family. I grew up in the north of England with a single mom and the first in my family to go to college. And it was on a full grant at the time in England. And I'm now a tenured professor teaching at college level.

And I'm privy to conversations within my liberal group of friends, privy to conversations that are disparaging about the so-called uneducated, which is the most of my family, and why they make decisions and how can they possibly make these decisions and so on and so forth. And I wonder if we educated class...

need to be more educated about the life experience of the working class folks and different options other than college and even working class kids who are at the college where I teach

feel silenced. If they're white working class, they feel unable to talk about certain things. And I just think we need to have a lot more empathy than just creating a divide between the so-called educated and uneducated. Thanks so much, Linda. I really appreciate your call. David, that's such an interesting point by Linda because I

I do think Joe Biden realized this. If you look at the way Joe Biden talked about jobs programs, his agenda, there was a lot less focus on getting a college degree than if you would listen to Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. A lot of his programs he tried to make, you know, incentivize jobs for folks who didn't have degrees without great political payoff. So what do you see there? Yeah, I think there are some Democrats who understand this as an issue, but...

You know, the Democratic Party and the leaders of the Democratic Party aren't the only people who sort of personify liberalism and personify progressivism in this country. And I do think the caller is very correct to point out that there is a way that educated liberals can speak that can come across as extremely condescending to people without rights.

college degrees. And they can sort of really almost literally say, you guys don't know what you're talking about. You should shut up and listen to us. We're smarter than you. We're more knowledgeable than you. And that, I think, is really...

very widely perceived among people without a college degree in this country right now is that they are looked down upon by people without people who do have college degrees. And they may take it out. Joe Biden doesn't talk that way, but but other Democrats and other liberals do. And they may take it out on Joe Biden. They may take it out on the Democratic Party when they get into the voting booth regardless. So I do think

that this sort of style of political communication can be very, very important in either exacerbating or at least trying to ameliorate some of these social divisions that we're talking about today. You're listening to Forum. I'm Guy Marzarati in for Mina Kim.

You know, David, as we talk about this diploma divide going forward in U.S. elections, how this will play out among young voters, you know, voters still to come. I think there's a reasonable argument that to be countercultural in 2024 is to be conservative. You have this great example in the book about Dave Chappelle. 20 years ago, Dave Chappelle was making fun of George Bush. Now he's making fun of transgender people. Is this part of an explanation as to why Democrats might be

losing grip on some of the younger voters in our electorate? Yeah, well, you know, the left moved from being the counterculture to the culture to a large extent over the past couple of generations. They moved into positions of authority.

And so you more and more see the American left identify with authority figures and view institutions and institutional rules as the way to promulgate the correct values among the masses.

You see this obviously for institutional policies on sensitivity training and things like that, or speech rules about what words you can and can't use. When the left sort of gained the ability to set

to set those institutional rules and procedures, they have used it to some degree, you know, in concert, you know, to the furtherance of their political goals and values. And so now the people who are kind of rebelling against authority, and at least that kind of authority, are going to see themselves more as aligned with conservatives and the sort of, you

the glee of political incorrectness that now conservatives sort of demonstrate. Whereas, you know, again, two generations ago, it was the conservatives telling everyone that they should follow the rules and listen to the authorities. So I do think there's a cultural reversal in a sense, at least a stylistic reversal in our culture that's maybe not remarked upon enough. But I think once you sort of start noticing it, you kind of see it everywhere. Yeah.

We have time for a call or two before the end of the hour. Let's go back to San Francisco and Robert. Hey, Robert. Hi. Yes. You mentioned the left trusting authority and institutions, but I would argue that it's potentially the Democratic Party being the left of politics rather than actual leftist people who are embracing institutions as the party moves more towards the center. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you so much for your call, Robert. I mean, yeah. What's the how do you delineate kind of the role here of politicians in the electorate when we hear Republicans attack elites, when we hear Democrats say trust the experts? To what extent are politicians responding to this division versus kind of driving the divide?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's really hard to tease out. Polarization in so many ways has a kind of a self-reinforcing quality to it. And so it's a chicken and egg issue a lot of times, even just trying to take a social science analysis to it. Once the ball gets rolling, it tends to self-perpetuate. And so people who do have respect for traditional social institutions and want to sort of work within the system, as they

become attracted to the Democratic Party and move into positions of power in the Democratic Party, they move the Democratic Party to become more like that, which further alienates the people who, you know, who have a more rebellious attitude towards institutions who then congregate in the Republicans and they sort of fuel the populist backlash on the right to all of this.

So in the book, we don't even try to sort out, you know, we don't have a sort of an origin story of all this kind of, you know, starts at one point in time. We think we have multiple important social trends that are all going together and they're all sort of working, working together. And another point I want to make before we leave, we talked about it just briefly before is, but I think it can't be said enough. None of this is unique to the United States.

None of this is only happening in America. It's not just because of Donald Trump. It's not just because of Fox News. It's not just because of our American educational system or university system or media system or anything like that. This is a global trend, and we're seeing it everywhere. We're seeing it in Europe. We're seeing it in Latin America. We're seeing it in Asia. There is just a moment in human history that we're all at right at this stage where we are dealing with the consequences of a pandemic

globalizing, secularizing, technocratic, culturally progressive change and the backlash and the responses to that change. I mean, that's playing out slightly differently in different countries, but there's many more commonalities than there are differences. We have about 30 seconds left. But before we go, given college educated voters do not make up a majority of voters, is this trend

more worrying for Democrats? And kind of how do you see this playing out in both midterm and future presidential elections?

The benefit for the Democrats is that educated voters are more likely to turn out in midterms and local elections. And so that may bode well for them in the next midterm election. But overall, there still are more people without college degrees than with college degrees. And so both parties need to pay attention to the non-college vote and they can't afford to write it off at all. And if they do, then yes, they probably will suffer an electoral consequence for it.

David Hopkins, Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston College, author of Polarized by Degrees, How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. David, thanks so much. Thanks a lot, Guy. It's a pleasure. That'll do it for today's show. I'm Guy Marzarati. Happy New Year, everyone.

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