Donald Trump, for instance, won about two-thirds of whites without a college degree—the most for any Republican since Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide—and they provided almost exactly half of his total votes, even though they represented only about one-third of the electorate, according to media exit polls. Similarly, 152 House Republicans, out of 241 total, represent heavily blue-collar districts where the white population exceeds the national average and the portion of those whites with at least a four-year degree lags below the national average. The GOP’s overwhelming advantage in those working-class districts underpins their House majority.

Using results from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, with supplemental data from an Urban Institute analysis of transfer payments, the new CBPP study challenges the frequent assumption that government anti-poverty programs primarily benefit minority communities. Instead, by examining the experience of working-age adults ages 18 to 64, the study presents evidence that education levels, not race, are the key dividing line in the programs’ reach.

“Safety-net programs are particularly beneficial for adults without a college degree,” wrote the study’s authors, Isaac Shapiro, Danilo Trisi, and Raheem Chaudhry. “The vast majority of working-age adults lifted above the poverty line by government benefits and tax credits are people lacking a college degree.”

The study’s biggest surprise may be how many of those beneficiaries are the non-college-educated whites critical to GOP fortunes. The study found that without accounting for government benefits, the poverty rate stood at nearly 25 percent for working-age white adults in families where no one holds at least a four-year college degree. That represents 14.1 million people in all.

But after accounting for the impact of federal anti-poverty and income-support programs—including Social Security, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (known formerly as food stamps), Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (generally described as welfare), and the earned-income and children’s tax credits—6.2 million of those non-college-educated white adults were raised above the poverty line. That reduced their poverty rate to less than one in seven, and meant that government benefits lifted fully 44 percent of otherwise poor, non-college-educated whites above the poverty line.

African Americans, Hispanics, and members of other races without advanced degrees confronted even higher poverty rates than working-class whites. But they didn’t gain quite as much from the federal anti-poverty programs. Although the CBPP analysts have not fully isolated the cause of that disparity, they say one factor may be the important role of Social Security in lifting people from poverty. That benefits whites most because they comprise the vast majority of today’s older Americans.