white boy in a political science class bingo

But by 2012, white voters without a college degree were distinctly more likely to vote Republican than those with college degrees. It often takes more than one election for people to switch their party identification. That change didn’t show up in the party-affiliation data right away, but that’s common, Tesler says. “If you were a low-educated white, you were much more likely to know about the partisan differences on race than you were before.” “Obama’s presidency simplifies the politics of race,” Michael Tesler, an associate professor of political science at UC Irvine, says. Therefore, white people with and without college degrees were equally as likely to be Democrats or Republicans.īut in 2008, the election of Barack Obama, a black man, signaled that the Democrats were becoming the party of progressive racial politics. Even though the Democrats had become the party of civil rights and a broad, multicultural coalition, they were also still the party of unions, which were largely made up of non-degree-holding whites. In their book, The Rise of Southern Republicans, the scholars Merle Black and Earl Black call this shift the “Great White Switch.”įrom the mid-1990s to 2008, the diploma divide was small, if not negligible. Still, strong support for the Democrats among whites without a college degree, borne out of economic incentives-and racial resentment-began to wane. Just because some voters swing across the aisle in one election doesn't mean they’ll quit the party they've identified with their entire lives. Party realignment doesn't happen overnight. Disaffected white southern Democrats, in particular, fled in droves.

Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. “The shift in whites without a college degree away from the Democratic Party begins as the Democratic Party becomes identified as the party of civil rights,” starting in the 1960s, Robert P. This split was relatively stable for decades and then, steadily, it began to change. There were far fewer college-educated Americans at the time, but the white Americans who did have degrees tended to vote Republican, and those who didn't sided with the Democrats by a significant margin. Meanwhile, the Democrats were the party of a coalition that pushed for social services-the party of the New Deal. The Republicans, to some extent, were still regarded as the party of Lincoln, even though they had shifted their focus to courting southern white voters, causing black people to leave the party. T he Democratic and Republican Parties looked a lot different in 1952, when the American National Election Studies-surveys of voters conducted before and after presidential elections-were in their infancy. The gap is likely to be one of the most powerful forces shaping American politics for decades to come. Last night’s results confirm that the diploma divide is likely here to stay-especially if the GOP maintains its alignment with Trump and the nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiments he hangs his hat on. Several events over the past six decades have caused these allegiances to switch, the most recent being the candidacy, election, and presidency of Donald Trump. Non-college-educated white voters used to solidly belong to Democrats, and college-educated white voters to Republicans. It’s an unprecedented divide, and is in fact a complete departure from the diploma divide of the past. The diploma divide, as it’s often called, is not occurring across the electorate it is primarily a phenomenon among white voters. Meanwhile 53 percent of college-educated white voters cast their votes for Democrats compared with 37 percent of those without a degree. O ne of the most striking patterns in yesterday’s election was years in the making: a major partisan divide between white voters with a college degree and those without one.Īccording to exit polls, 61 percent of non-college-educated white voters cast their ballots for Republicans while just 45 percent of college-educated white voters did so.

White boy in a political science class bingo