Why Pa. voters without college degrees are souring on Democrats

In 2020, President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by improving on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance among almost every kind of voter in the state.

But there were exceptions.

More than two in five precincts across the state were worse for Biden than they were for Clinton. And while those precincts ranged from rural to suburban to dense urban areas, nearly all had one thing in common: On average, they had far lower rates of college education than the rest of the state.

In one heavily Democratic Harrisburg precinct, for example, Biden won — but by 314 votes fewer than Clinton had.

In red rural Leacock Township, Lancaster County, neither Biden nor Clinton cracked 20% of the vote — but Biden got 542 fewer votes than Clinton.

Education isn’t everything. While an Inquirer analysis found that college education was the single largest predictor of vote change from 2016 to 2020, other factors, taken together, mattered more. Voters’ preferences depend on a lot of economic and social considerations, many of which are hard to measure.

Still, in a big swing state where only a third of adults have college degrees, it could be meaningful. Even a small drift of voters without them toward former President Donald Trump could easily hand him Pennsylvania.

“I don’t think it’s overstated to say that education, beyond any other demographic factor, has impacted American politics and polarization,” said Chris Borick, director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College.

By now, that story is at least partly familiar: White voters without college degrees have been abandoning Democrats, famously sinking Clinton’s chances in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in 2016.

The Inquirer’s analysis of the 2020 election made clear that Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters have also started polarizing along educational lines. And polls taken before Biden dropped out in July showed voters of color without college degrees shifting even further away from Democrats.

People with college educations have long expressed greater political engagement and liberal social views — but that didn’t necessarily affect how they voted. Survey data from the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin and Marshall College shows that, as recently as 2000, college-educated voters in Pennsylvania were divided evenly between the parties. But by 2022, half of Pennsylvania Democrats had bachelor’s degrees — compared with less than a third of Republicans.

To understand why, it’s worth thinking about how national politics have changed.

“That answer is ‘culture war,’” said David Hopkins, a Boston College political scientist who is writing a book on educational polarization.

In the 20th century, partisanship revolved around economics, with Democrats supporting more government intervention and Republicans supporting freer markets. Now, social and cultural issues have become more salient. College itself has been caught in the cross fire: Republicans increasingly think colleges are bad for America.

“As the Democrats become the party of … the affluent suburban bourgeoisie, where what’s really important is what pronouns you use, or your tolerance for migrants from other countries, there are multiple groups in society who will feel like that doesn’t speak to them to the same degree as it did in the past,” said Hopkins.

“And Republicans have their own set of dangers. Their style and substance have lost them a lot of suburban voters.”

Other factors that affect changing partisanship aren’t as easy to measure as education. Polls show widening splits by gender, and in some cycles older voters behave very differently from younger voters. But because men and women live in similar places, as do young and old people, it can be hard to tease out these factors’ importance from place-based election results data.

Berwood Yost, a pollster at Franklin and Marshall, said regionalism also matters for Pennsylvania voters, perhaps more than in other states.

“The educational changes that we’ve seen cut across geographies,” said Yost. “But there’s also an added explanation by where people live. There’s some value in knowing if someone is from central Pa. vs. western Pa.”

Because regions differ in culture and economy, individual campaigns still matter.

But pollsters remain vexed about how much education has started to matter in people’s vote choice. In the past, “education didn’t move the needle much. So we just avoided it,” Borick said. “Of course, 2016 changed all of that.”