The trends are undeniable. Over the past three presidential elections, the number of people identifying as a Republican who graduated with a college degree have fallen. In 2008, for example, 34% of people who identified as Republicans, or leaned Republican, had a college degree or higher. That number fell to 31% by 2016. At the same time, the Democratic Party has seen its share of highly educated voters rise. In 2008, 32% of people who identified as Democrats, or leaned Democrats, had a college degree or higher. That number increased to 37% in 2016. This means that among the people who made up the Republican base, fewer and fewer possessed at least a college degree.
To look at it another way, when evaluating the distribution of registered voters, Republicans have been gaining a greater share among those voters who lack at least a college degree. In 2008, of the registered voters with a high school degree or less, 36% either identified as, or leaned, Republican. That number increased to 45% in 2016. Meanwhile, 53% of these same registered voters identified as, or leaned, Democrat in 2008. That number fell to 45% in 2016. Likewise, 40% of registered voters with only some college identified as, or leaned, Republican in 2008. That number grew to 46% in 2016. Those same registered voters who identified as, or leaned, Democrats fell from 50% in 2008 to 45% in 2016. In general, Republican voters have been getting less educated, while Democratic voters have been getting more educated.
The trend, that Republicans have been attracting a greater share of voters with less of an education, played out distinctly in the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump won in the category of voters with only some college education or less by a margin of eight percentage points in 2016. Hillary Clinton won in the category of voters with a college degree or more education by nine percentage points. A starker contrast becomes clear when race is factored into the analysis. Among white voters with some college or less, Trump won this category in 2016 by a whopping thirty-nine percentage points. That was up from 2012, when Mitt Romney won this category by twenty-five percentage points. A full 61% of non-college educated white voters chose Trump in 2016.
The less educated a person is, the more likely that person is to vote Republican. In particular, if a person is white and lacks a college education, the Republican Party can practically count on that person's vote. This trend correlates with a strategy by Republicans and conservative opinion leaders to discourage higher education, and attack intellectualism that has played out over the past two or three decades.
Let's go back to August of 1988. That's when Rush Limbaugh took his radio talk show national through syndication. That was followed by a best seller book in 1992, and another in 1993. By 2003, Limbaugh was bragging of twenty millions listeners per week.
He was the pioneer of a movement that shaped the Republican Party, and continues to influence Republican voters to this day.
In 1994, for example, the Republican Party won enough seats in the House of Representatives to control the chamber. That was the first time the Republicans had done that in forty years. This was a watershed moment in the conservative movement. For his part in motivating ordinary people to vote Republican, Limbaugh was dubbed "The Majority Maker" by Republican leadership.
All during this time, Rush was railing against higher education. Rush, and other conservative talk show hosts like Sean Hannity, are college drop-outs. On his show, Rush extols the success of people, like himself, who have chosen not to seek a college degree. And for those who choose to pursue higher education, they're met with mockery. Rush calls college students "skulls full of mush." He complains that liberal college professors fill these skulls full of mush with garbage liberal ideas. Ideas like socialism and multi-culturalism.
As for the schools themselves, Rush calls them "screwls," integrating the word "screw" into his derisive nickname. To Rush, prestigious institutions of higher education, like Harvard or Stanford, are just part of a racket. Not only are they screwing you out of your money, they're filling your head with dangerous leftist ideas.
When it comes to the student loan crisis, Limbaugh shows no pity. He usually takes the tact that if you chose to take out loans to go to college, then you shouldn't cry over the fact that you have to pay that money back.
Mind you, because of the explosion of the cost of higher education, students are coming out of school with debt so large, it's comparable to a mortgage. Sometimes, that's the result of for-profit learning institutions who promise prospective students help in job placement, but never deliver. Republicans, led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, have been moving to thwart efforts to forgive student loans where private for-profit institutions have either failed to deliver the promised education by going out of business, or failing to provide thee students with the promised job placement.
Nonetheless, Limbaugh claims that the student loan crisis is all part of a liberal conspiracy. Liberals are encouraging you to go to college, and take out these student loans to pay for it. Once they have you hooked with enormous debt, then you become dependent on them, as they propose ways to forgive that debt.
And heaven forbid any candidate consider proposing tuition free higher education. Well, that's just socialism, and we don't want to become like Venezuela.
Notice that Republicans and their opinion influencers in the media are engaging in this attack on higher education, at a time when a college education has been shown to be a key to earning more money. Indeed, estimates are that the United States is entering an economy where 60% of the available jobs require a college degree or higher.
Having mocked the education system, it then becomes easier to mock the scientific community and studies that support difficult solutions to complex problems. Mental health issues, environmental protection and climate change, health care reform, just reject the proposals out of hand as so-called "junk science." After all, you've just discouraged your followers to seek a college education. How are they going to know any better?
To put it bluntly, for decades, the Republican Party and their supporters in the media have engaged in an outright campaign against intellectualism. And this prolonged campaign against intellectualism has worked. Only 36% of people who identify themselves as Republicans, or who lean Republican, view colleges and universities positively. This compares to 72% of those who identify as Democrats, or who lean Democrat, who view colleges and universities positively. A full 58% of Republicans and Republican leaners view colleges and universities negatively.
More disturbingly, with the expansion of cable TV channels, and with the ubiquitousness of the Internet, people are choosing which facts to believe, based on their pre-conceived worldview. With the availability of Fox News, the One America News Network, the Sinclair Network, Prager University, conservative voters have license to ignore objective facts that prove inconvenient for their ideology. The Republican Party has spent decades cultivating the low information voter as a base for its power. Now they're manipulating that base in an effort to cling on to that power.
Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, for example, was tailor-made for the low information voter. First, Trump's campaign wasn't about issues. His campaign was about creating entertainment by starting fights with his opponents, calling them insulting names and engaging in ad hominem attacks. Trump has experience in reality TV, a genre that is known to thrive by carefully editing footage to create conflict and drama. He knew that drama drives ratings. And the way to manufacture drama was not by seriously debating the major issues facing our country with facts and carefully crafted proposals. The way to manufacture drama is to pick a fight. In the primaries, Trump did just that, in part, by throwing around insulting nicknames.
For example, when the 2016 presidential campaign was just beginning, Ted Cruz was the candidate with the most credentials as a champion of conservative values. In the aftermath of the 2012 election, when the Tea Party started showing its power within the Republican Party, Cruz went to great lengths to court the Tea Party vote and make himself out to be THE choice for voters with strong conservative values. But, to be blunt, he wasn't very likeable. In the primaries, where there was a crowded field, Cruz, like other candidates, had a hard time distinguishing himself from the rest of the pack. In my humble opinion, if Trump had not entered the race, Cruz would have probably wound up being the nominee because of his strong credentials as a supporter of Tea Party positions.
But along came Donald Trump. He wasn't a conservative. Heck, he wasn't always a Republican. But he labeled Ted Cruz "Lyin' Ted." He picked fights with Cruz. He insulted Cruz's wife. Cruz didn't know how to fight back. But Trump didn't stop there. He dismissed Marco Rubio, another strong conservative candidate, as "Liddle Marco." He tagged John Kasich as "1 for 38," then "1 for 41," and "1 for 44," as a reference to the number of primaries Kasich won. Jeb Bush was "Low Energy Jeb." He picked fights, and created drama. The low information voters, who usually tune out of politics except for presidential elections, loved it. Here was a guy willing to get dirty and fight. And they responded by supporting him.
In the general election, he continued with this tactic, labeling Hillary Clinton "Crooked Hillary," referring to the numerous rumors of political scandals that surrounded her. With the exception of the email scandal, none of the supposed scandals, like the rumor that people who opposed Hillary sooner or later wound up dead, never really had any hard evidence to back them up. But that didn't matter. Trump wasn't trying to convince people with facts. He just wanted to turn the election into a street fight that people couldn't look away from.
And what policies Trump did support manipulated the irrational fears of uneducated white voters. He railed against Muslims, and promised a Muslim travel ban. He labeled Mexicans as murderers and rapists, and promised to build a wall to keep Mexicans from crossing the border illegally. This wasn't a campaign that was meant to engage people in a serious manner on an intellectual level. Facts and logic meant nothing. Entertaining drama and fear mongering meant everything.
Moreover, this war on intellectualism and reason continued once Trump moved into the White House. Consider, the federal Government has numerous complex subjects that it regulates. From international trade, to environmental protection, to communications policy, there are numerous complicated subjects that are addressed by different agencies within the Government. To administer those programs, the Government needs a corps of highly trained, knowledgeable professionals. The backbone of the Government is a body of highly educated civil servants, whose jobs do not depend on the whims of the political appointees.
But when Trump wanted to make things easier for businesses by slashing regulations, these were the people who resisted. They knew that rules and regulations existed for a reason, such a promoting a policy goal like clean air. Professionals also understood ethics rules, which required the avoidance of not only actual conflicts of interests, but also the appearance of any conflicts. When they resisted Trump's attempts to "drain the swamp," Trump and his willing accomplices in conservative media labeled the bureaucracy the "deep state." They were now not the highly trained professional civil servants needed to operate the federal Government. They were now the entrenched liberal intellectuals conspiring to thwart Trump's presidency behind the scenes. Trump's response was once again to create drama by going on the attack, only this time to fault people for merely doing their job, like law enforcement officials and national security experts.
A lot of damage has been done to the federal Government because of Trump and the Republican Party waging this war on intellectualism. Ethics rules have been watered down. Law enforcement agencies have been corrupted. Policies based on sound scientific principles have been abandoned. And the national dialogue on important, complex political issues has been sullied and dragged into the mud. All of this has happened in the name of creating drama, in order to manipulate the ignorant and the less educated, and keep the Republican Party in power to pursue policies to help the bottom lines of big business, regardless of whether he policies may be harmful in the long run.
By: William J. Kovatch, Jr.
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References
Harris, Adam, "America Is Divided by Education," The Atlantic (November 7, 2018).
Limbaugh, Rush, "College Doesn't Make Sense for Everyone," The Rush Limbaugh Show (March 6, 2018).
Limbaugh, Rush "Will Trump Do Something on Student Loans," iHeart Radio (April 12, 2019) (transcript of Rush Limbaugh's radio program).
Michael Smerconish, "How Rush Limbaugh in 1988 Propelled Trump's 2016 Win," CNN (August 3, 2019).
Newport, Frank, "Democrats Racially Diverse; Republicans Mostly White," Gallup (February 8, 2013).
"The Parties on the Eve of the 2016 Election: Two Coalitions, Moving Further Apart," Pew Research Center (September 13, 2016).
Quintana, Chris, "House Democrats overturn DeVos on student loan forgiveness, but change unlikely to pass the Senate," USA Today (January 16, 2020).
Schwatrz, Ian, "Limbaugh: What about people who took student loans and paid them back," Real Clear Politics (April 24, 2019).
"Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions," Pew Research Center (July 10, 2017).
Thompson, Derek, "The Republican War on College," The Atlantic (November 20, 2017).
Tyson, Alec and Maniam, Shiva, "Behind Trump's victory: Divisions by race, gender, education," Pew Research Center (November 9, 2016).
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