Pennsylvania voters without college degrees are increasingly turned off by Democrats

In 2020, President Joe Biden won Pennsylvania, improving on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance among nearly every group of voters in the state.

But there were exceptions.

More than two in five precincts statewide went worse for Biden than for Clinton. And while those precincts included rural, suburban, and densely populated urban areas, nearly all had one thing in common: On average, they had significantly lower rates of college education than the rest of the state.

For example, in Harrisburg, a Democratic-majority district, Biden won — but by 314 votes less than Clinton.

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

Education isn’t everything. While the Inquirer’s analysis found that higher education was the single biggest predictor of vote change from 2016 to 2020, other factors, taken together, mattered more. Voter preferences are influenced by a range of economic and social factors, many of which are complex to measure.

Still, in a vast swing state where only about a third of adults have college degrees, it could make a difference. Even a compact shift of non-college voters toward former President Donald Trump could easily have carried him to Pennsylvania.

“I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that education, more than any other demographic factor, has had an impact on American politics and polarization,” said Chris Borick, director of the Public Opinion Institute at Muhlenberg College.

The story is at least partly familiar by now: White voters without college degrees are moving away from Democrats, which hurt Clinton’s chances in Pennsylvania and other battleground states in 2016.

The Inquirer’s analysis of the 2020 election clearly showed that Black, Spanishand Asian voters have also begun to polarize along educational lines. And polls conducted before Biden withdrew in July showed voters of color without college degrees moving even further away from Democrats.

What does college have to do with this?

People with higher education have long been more politically engaged and have more liberal social views — but that hasn’t necessarily affected how they vote. Survey data from the Opinion Research Center at Franklin and Marshall College show that as recently as 2000, Pennsylvania voters with a college degree were evenly split between parties. But by 2022, half of Pennsylvania Democrats had a bachelor’s degree — compared with less than a third of Republicans.

To understand why, it is worth considering how national politics have changed.

“The answer is ‘culture war,’” said David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College who is writing a book on polarization in education.

In the 20th century, partisanship revolved around economics, with Democrats favoring more government intervention and Republicans favoring more free markets. Now, social and cultural issues have become more perceptible. The college itself is caught in the crossfire: Republicans more and more people think that colleges are bad for America.

“As the Democrats become the party of … the affluent suburban bourgeoisie, where it really matters what pronouns you use or how tolerant you are of migrants from other countries, there are many groups in society who feel that this doesn’t speak to them in the same way as it did in the past,” Hopkins said.

“And Republicans have their own set of threats. Their style and substance have caused them to lose a lot of suburban voters.”

What other factors matter?

Other factors that influence partisan shifts are not as straightforward to measure as education. Polls show deepening gender divisionsand in some cycles, older voters behave quite differently from younger voters. But because men and women live in similar places, as do teenage and ancient people, it is complex to tease out the significance of these factors from place-based election results data.

Berwood Yost, a polling expert at Franklin and Marshall, said regionalism also matters to voters in Pennsylvania, perhaps more so than in other states.

“The educational changes we’ve seen cut across geographic boundaries,” Yost said. “But there’s also the added explanation of where people live. There’s some value in knowing whether someone comes from central Pa. or western Pa..”

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

But pollsters remain irritated by how much education has come to matter in how people vote. In the past, “education didn’t matter as much. So we just avoided it,” Borick said. “Of course, 2016 changed everything.”