Meghan Milloy grew up in southern Mississippi, a deep red state steeped in conservative Christian values. In high school, she founded a Teenage Republicans club, and before she was eligible to vote, traveled to New Hampshire to knock on doors for George W Bush’s re-election campaign. She later joined the College Republicans and worked for Mitt Romney in Ohio in 2012.

This year, however, Milloy cannot stomach supporting her party’s nominee, Donald Trump – and she’s not alone. The Pepperdine law school alumna is part of a constituency that no Republican presidential nominee since 1956 has lost but one that Hillary Clinton stands poised to win: white voters with a college degree.

“I never thought that it would get to a point where I would have to make a decision not to vote for the Republican nominee,” said Milloy, chair of Republican Women for Hillary.

While blue-collar workers, and men in particular, helped Trump clinch the Republican nomination and will be critical to him in November, the Republican nominee is struggling to attract college-educated white voters.



Trump’s brash temperament and hardline politics are accelerating the gradual splintering of white voters along educational and gender lines. And the publication of an 11-year-old recording in which Trump boasted that being famous allowed him to force himself on women is only expected to exacerbate this.

In a recent Washington Post/ABC survey, 62% of white voters without a college education support Trump compared with 39% among white college graduates, a 23-point margin. And in Pennsylvania, a major battleground state this election, a majority of voters with a college education – or 56% – support Clinton, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist Poll released last week. If this holds, it would be the largest educational divide among white voters in at least three decades.

“If Clinton wins, white educated voters, especially white educated women, will be a crucial voting bloc in getting her elected,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institute.



This constituency could hand Clinton an edge in key battleground states like North Carolina, Virginia and Colorado where a significant proportion of the electorate has a higher education.

White college-educated women could buffer Clinton against an exceedingly high turnout for Trump among white non-college-educated men, according to a projection model Frey designed based on current polling, US Census Bureau data and 2012 turnout rates. In another scenario, this group delivers a landslide victory for the white, college-educated woman on the Democratic ticket at a level unmatched since Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The defection of non-college-educated white voters – once a bedrock of the Democrats’ coalition – to the Republican party and, conversely, the march of college-educated white voters to the Democratic party has been slowly occurring over the past several election cycles. Frey said that although Romney won both constituencies in 2012, President Obama held a slight edge among college-educated white women.

Trump’s path to the White House relies heavily on maximizing turnout among non-college-educated white men to deliver wins in the Rust Belt states.

He has firmly embraced this constituency, stoking the fires of a working-class revolt with his populist appeal. “We won with poorly educated,” the Wharton School of business graduate bragged at a rally after winning the Nevada caucuses. “I love the poorly educated.”

But in the process of appealing to this demographic group, Trump has pushed away white voters with a college degree who are more likely to view immigration and global trade – issues that have animated his campaign – as positive forces, said Michelle Diggles, a senior policy analyst at Third Way, a liberal thinktank that examined the splintering of white voters.

“White people with a college degree are much more likely to be optimistic about their own lives,” Diggles said. “They tend to think they have efficacy, that they’re in control of their own life and that they can successfully or relatively successfully navigate the forces that are transforming our society and economy much better.”

A survey conducted by Third Way found that more than half of white voters without a college education believed the economy was rigged. By contrast, nearly half of college-educated white voters said they believed it was not. Similarly, 45% of non-college-educated whites said the deck was stacked against people like them, while only 29% of college-educated white voters agreed with the sentiment.



Diggles added: “White people without a college degree are much more likely to see a rigged system, to see the forces of globalization acting against them and they don’t feel like they have control over their own destiny.”

Gregory Rosenthal, a retina surgeon and a member of Republicans for Clinton, is deeply disdainful of Trump’s anti-intellectual appeal to uneducated voters’ fears and anxieties and equally critical of the GOP nominee’s apparent want for complex ideas and speech.



“Trump is an imbecile like the fictitious Chauncey Gardiner, supported by a rogues’ gallery of cynics hoping to control him,” Rosenthal wrote in an emailed response, making reference to the lead character in the 1979 movie Being There.

Rosenthal described his gradual split with the Republican party over its nominee as a “slow motion spiral into a dark hole” and that nothing Trump does at this point could win back his vote.

This isn’t the first time he has supported a Democratic nominee, however. In 2008, Rosenthal voted for Obama after John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate.