Rekha Basu

rbasu@dmreg.com

When Donald Trump gushed, “I love the poorly educated!” after winning the Nevada Republican caucuses in February, he had good reason for the romance. His win with a majority of the state's Republican voters included 57 percent of those with a high school education or less. That pattern has stayed consistent in the general election campaign, with national polls showing Trump ahead by 23 points with white voters age 24 or older who don't have a college degree.

Hillary Clinton, conversely, has a 15-point lead with white voters with college degrees.

How did that happen, when for the past 50 years, the Republican candidate for president has won white college-educated voters — by as much as 26 points in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the nominee? In fact Trump is considered competitive in Iowa and Ohio because 72 percent of white people over 24 don’t have college degrees in these states. That's the highest proportion of the 13 swing states. Meanwhile, the reverse trend is at work for Clinton in New Hampshire and Colorado, where college-degree bearing white voters are well represented.

Several things about this are surprising. If you followed the history of the American labor movement and its progressive legacy of collective bargaining for better wages and working conditions, it's hard to imagine a capitalist like Trump winning over blue-collar workers bad-mouthing immigrants. Just think back on the solidarity of farm and factory and transportation workers of all stripes: Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, A. Philip Randolph.

On the flip side, college graduates aspiring to be future entrepreneurs and company presidents, who at one time would have gravitated to the candidate promising pro-business policies, can't bring themselves to do it with this one.

I called up David Kochel, the Iowa Republican strategist who ran the campaigns of Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Joni Ernst, to get his take. He currently spends his days on the campus of arguably the world's most elite institution, Harvard University, where he's a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. Trump wouldn't like that. Then again, Kochel doesn't like Trump. He calls him a "charlatan."

Members of his party have embraced a new “microculture,” Kochel explained, defined by an anti-intellectual, anti-science streak that is more populist than it is economically conservative. He says as it has grown more socially conservative in the last decade or so, it has also lost some of its more educated members.

This microculture is embodied in people like Steven Bannon — the chairman of Breitbart News and Trump’s campaign — and conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart. Like them, Trump has sowed divisions, Kochel says, between urban and rural, college educated and non-college. But instead of traditional left and right, Trump's campaign has depicted it as a battle between elites and those left out.

"There's a reason Trump is doing better than Romney in Iowa," said Kochel of blue-collar voters. While Trump speaks as if he's on their side, "Romney looks like the guy who closed the plant."

I asked the same questions of Democrat George Drake, the president emeritus of Grinnell College and professor emeritus of history. Drake is teaching a course on Crisis in Leadership, which examines the legacies of Washington, Lincoln, Gandhi, King and Mandela (Or as Trump might say, more elitism).

Drake focuses on the need for critical thinking to respond to a candidate who asks an aide why he should not use nuclear weapons. He says college educated people may be more likely to read newspapers and learn about Trump's background than listen to conspiracy theories on TV talk shows. Of Clinton, he says, "They're smart enough to know that for 25 years, she's been under attack and they haven't found anything." As for Trump: "If you're educated enough, you recognize there is no 'there' there in what he's promising."

Voters without college degrees are more likely to be falling behind economically, say both Drake and Kochel. Their attraction to Trump and Bernie Sanders suggests, "These folks have finally had it," Drake said. And Trump is promising change. But he is also, as Kochel notes, laying blame elsewhere, such as undocumented immigrants, when the real culprit for the loss of $20- or $30-an-hour plant jobs is globalization.

The Wall Street Journal calls educational attainment “the clearest dividing line in this year’s presidential election.” And it says, “The race, to a large extent, will turn on whether Mrs. Clinton’s appeal among whites with college degrees will outweigh Mr. Trump’s appeal among those without them.”

I was hoping to be able to question the Iowa party chairs about this, but Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann was said to be unavailable. (He did make time for my colleague, Kathie Obradovich.) The Iowa Democratic Party sent over a statement from Chairwoman Andy McGuire that said early voting shows Clinton "has wide support across all sectors of Iowa and the country," and cited Clinton's plans to raise wages and invest in jobs. “Donald Trump, on the other hand, has done nothing but divide our country with hateful rhetoric and blatant bigotry," the statement said, adding that his economic plan would "benefit millionaires and billionaires like himself." It accused him of outsourcing jobs that hurt states like Iowa.

The shifting tactics of political parties are interesting fodder for strategists, but what matters is how people's lives are affected by who wins. You can dismiss college educations and those who have them as elitist. But without one in this changing economy, your prospects of making a decent, dependable living are limited. Undecided voters might want to shut out the noise and focus on which candidate will make college more accessible and affordable for them and their children.