How Democrats Ended Up On The Losing Side Of The Class Divide

I hope everyone had a nice Memorial Day Weekend!

If you’ve paid any attention to politics over the past decade you know that one of the most important ways America’s coalitions have changed is that Democrats have done increasingly well among voters with college degrees, while Republicans have done increasingly well among voters without them. In a country in which 63 percent of people don’t have a degree, that’s a losing proposition for Democrats.

The challenge facing Democrats runs deeper than strictly whether their voters completed a bachelor’s program. We talk about educational attainment so much, in part, because it's easily measured. We collect education data on the census and pollsters routinely ask respondents about it. But often when we talk about the diploma divide, we’re actually talking about something more complicated. We’re talking about class.

Class can shape all kinds of things about ourselves, including – importantly for our purposes – what we value in our leaders and how we want them to solve our problems. That is the topic of the new book by Joan C. Williams, “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back,” and she’s today’s guest on the podcast.

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