Today, Americans with a college degree account for 38% of the population and 73% of household wealth

 

"New fault lines are emerging in American society based more on class than race.

The shift helped deliver the White House to Donald Trump and could continue to alter the political landscape if more Americans identify themselves less in the context of race and gender and more as belonging to a certain economic class.

"Race is not an issue for me," said Aaron Waters, a Black unionized construction worker in Chicago who voted for Trump after voting for President Biden and Barack Obama in past elections. "It's about what you can do for each and every one of us as a whole, as a U.S. citizen."

Trump made gains with most demographic groups in this month's election. 

But one of the biggest swings was among voters of all races who don't have a four-year college degree.

 He won them by 13 percentage points this time versus 4 percentage points in 2020 -- a huge change in a group that accounted for more than half of the electorate. 

College-educated voters of all races also swung to Trump, but to a much smaller degree.

Black and, to a greater extent, Latinos, meanwhile, ceded some of their longtime allegiance to Democrats. Trump gained with nonwhite voters of all education levels, but he made bigger gains with those who don't have degrees than with those who do.

Overall voting patterns still clearly reflect racial division. Black voters overwhelmingly backed Vice President Kamala Harris, and a slim majority of Latino voters did, too. William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer, said the shifts could be a "blip" related to sharp inflation, and that it's too soon "to predict a multiracial transformation of the GOP."

There is evidence the shift in voting patterns predates this election. In 2022, for instance, voters in a Detroit district elected a non-Black representative to Congress, marking the first time in nearly 70 years that the majority-Black city had no Black representation in Congress.

"This is the shock of the early 21st century," said Todd Shaw, associate professor of political science and African-American studies at the University of South Carolina. Shaw said for many minority voters, economic anxiety often outweighs other political considerations, especially in the wake of a pandemic that hit many working voters hard.

The shift toward class-based sorting also comes as some of the nation's longtime racial categories -- white, Black and Hispanic -- are dissolving fast into more fluid and complex identities. As those categories blur, other factors, like education levels and class, are playing larger roles in Americans' quality-of-life and are increasingly driving choices.

Thirty years ago, Americans with a college degree accounted for roughly 20% of the population and held the same percentage of household wealth as those without a degree, according to the census and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. 

Today, Americans with a college degree account for 38% of the population and 73% of household wealth.

Voting patterns among those without a college degree reflect the new fault lines, from white women in suburban Atlanta to Black construction workers and Latino retail employees in Chicago. These voters seem to have little in common on paper, but this month they coalesced around Trump.

That outcome reflected a shift in the decades-old orientation of the two-party political system. It marked just how successful the Republican Party has been at refashioning its image as the champion for the working class, and served as a warning sign for Democratic Party leadership.

American political alignment has shifted in big ways before, according to Colby College professor Nicholas F. Jacobs, who said that in the 1980s, it became more important whether a voter lived in an urban or rural area than whether they lived in a particular part of the country.

He sees evidence of a similar realignment along lines of class in this month's election. Democrats at times tried to use statistics, he said, to argue that inflation wasn't really hurting people and that voters' concerns about immigration were unfounded.

"The most important thing about class politics is the sense that you are recognized, you have value in our society, and the person seeking your vote sees you have dignity and worth," he said." [1]

D. Trump did exactly that.

1. U.S. News: Class, Not Race, Drives Political Identity --- Shift helped elect Trump and looms as the key factor in future voting trends. Whalen, Jeanne; Bauerlein, Valerie; Campo-Flores, Arian.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 18 Nov 2024: A.6.