“No one ever says ‘Why aren’t all the white folks for Donald Trump?’”

With the election upon us, I’ve been inundated by a persistent media narrative: Black voters, a reliably blue bloc, are moving away from the Democratic party.

The headlines sound very foreboding: “Milwaukee’s Black voters expose cracks in Democratic foundation for Harris.” “Black voters drift from Democrats, imperiling Harris’s bid, poll shows.” 

The stories are based on polls that show 78% of Black voters nationally say they will vote for Harris, an increase since President Joe Biden left the race, but still trailing the number of Black voters who backed him in 2020. The New York Times points out that this gap could hurt Harris’s chances of winning key battleground states. (Harris, for her part, has said she understands she has to earn the vote of Black people just like she has to earn the vote of anybody else.) 

One in five Black men say they are supporting Donald Trump, according to the Times poll, and the overall share of Black voters backing Trump has increased, to about 15%. 

While I understand the concern for Democrats here, the stories are sounding the alarm when the vast majority of Black voters still say they are backing Harris. 

Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford, two Black journalists and co-hosts of the podcast Vibe Check, talked about this polling narrative on a recent episode. It’s reductive and just the latest example of the scapegoating that can occur when elections are tight, they said. 

“What people are trying to say is that ‘Why aren't all Black people voting for the Black woman? Like how is it not 100%?’ Which is not a standard we hold to anyone else in this country,” Stafford said. “No one ever says ‘Why aren't all the white folks for Donald Trump?’ No one ever says that.” 

In addition to treating Black voters like a monolith, an overemphasis on these numbers ignores what has become a better indicator of how people will vote: the college degree. 

It wasn’t always a partisan thing. In 2000, Al Gore and George W. Bush split the 100 most-educated counties in the nation. But just two decades later, Joe Biden won 83 of them. 

The reverse is true for counties where few have a college degree. For example, in 2020 Donald Trump won nine out of 10 of the least-educated counties, where fewer than 16% of adults have a college degree. 

(This is all according to an Open Campus analysis of election results and U.S. Census Bureau data that we did after the 2020 election.)  

We’re already seeing signs that this degree divide will be a factor in this election. For one thing, young men are shifting right. This coincides with the fact that the share of college students who are men has declined since 2011. 

The influence of a college degree isn’t just present at the presidential portion of the ticket. Democrats won white college-educated voters by three points and Republicans won non-college-educated voters by 34 points in the 2022 midterm elections. That’s according to Doug Sosnik, who was senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton and wrote an analysis memo about this last year. 

Realignment based on education levels has resulted in tribal politics, Sosnik said. There are now veto-proof majorities in 29 states and in 39 states, one party has unified control of the governorship and state legislature. 

“This new class-based politics oriented around the education divide could turn out to be just as toxic as race-based politics,” Sosnik said in the memo. “It has facilitated a sorting of America into enclaves of like-minded people who look at members of the other enclave with increasing contempt.” 

++ Paul Glastris of The Washington Monthly made the case that Democrats have a big opportunity if they can connect with voters who went to regional public universities, in other words, most people who go to college in America. Glastris says vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s populist language is an appeal to these voters who went to state colleges like he did. 

Open Campus co-founder Sara Hebel tied Glastris’s essay to our model: “By changing the emphasis in the public dialogue about college, we can help more people see themselves in higher ed, too.” 

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Join us for a conversation about life after high school

We wanted to better understand how young people learn about college and career options, so we worked with a team of local ambassadors in Chicago and Houston and talked to as many community members as we could.

We learned a lot about where people get information, the gaps in what they know, and the barriers that get in their way.

Join us Tuesday, Nov. 12 at 2 p.m. EST for a virtual conversation about our findings. Our panel features voices from Chicago and Houston:

• Stephanie Quintana, recent graduate, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Jessica Barrera, student, University of Texas at Austin

• Juliet Stipeche, executive director, Gulf Coast Workforce Board

• Dominique McKoy, executive director, To&Through Project at The University of Chicago Urban Education InstituteElsewhere on Open Campus

Elsewhere on Open Campus

In sticking with the theme here, I wanted to highlight two election-related stories from our Local Network:

From Fort Worth: There was a heated battle over voting locations in Texas’s Tarrant County — which backed Biden in 2020 — this fall. A Republican county judge had called for several campus voting sites to be scrapped, including the one at the University of Texas at Arlington. Ultimately, the idea didn’t get the support it needed to happen.

Shomial Ahmad, our reporter at the Fort Worth Report, has tracked the saga and followed students to the polls this week.

Volunteers working voting sites say they’re now seeing a lot more activity.

“Usually we are asking people, are you registered to vote?” said Barbara Leath, a Grapevine retiree and a volunteer deputy registrar. “(This time) we weren’t even asking. (Students) were just coming up to us and saying, ‘I need to get this done.’”

From California: This Election Day, California voters will have a chance to decide whether to support of the repair of aging community college facilities. While some worry about the state taking on debt to pay for the fixes, the colleges themselves say “yes” votes on Proposition 2 are vital.

One of the most pressing repair projects is at El Camino College in Torrance, writes Adam Echelman at our partner CalMatters. The thousands of feet of underground pipes used to cool and heat its buildings are at imminent risk of failure.

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