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In 1990, Michael Jordan refused his mom’s request to publicly oppose the reelection of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina), a fierce segregationist. Why? Because, Jordan said in perhaps his most famous quote, “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/04/14/michael-jordan-espn-documentary/" target=_blank>Republicans buy sneakers, too</a>.”

It’s wildly presumptuous for newspaper nerds such as ourselves to question Air Jordan, but — are we sure about that?

We’ve never been able to measure partisan spending habits directly; our friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics can’t exactly ask participants in the <a href="https://www.bls.gov/cex/" target=_blank>Consumer Expenditure Survey </a>whom they voted for. But looking at the results of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">2024 election</a>, it occurred to us we could get pretty dang close by looking at another measure: education.

Department of Data Column Branding

We here at the Department of Data are dedicated to exploring the weird and wondrous power of the data that defines our world. <a href="https://washingtonpost.com/business/2022/06/29/dept-of-data/" target=_blank>Read more.</a>

We don’t have stellar data yet — clerks in some states are still out there counting votes — but it seems that at the very least, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> solidified the educational divide that has defined his era. In fact, if exit polls are to be believed, he appears to have expanded his White base of support to include elements of the Hispanic and Asian working class.

It’s the culmination of a long-running trend. In the Reagan era, more Americans with college degrees identified as Republican or Republican-leaning, according to the General Social Survey from NORC at the University of Chicago. By 2021 and 2022, Democrats led that group by about 20 percentage points. People with graduate degrees have grown even more lopsided: Democrats now outnumber Republicans in that category by about 3 to 1.

It further confirms a theme that ran through our pre-election columns: Republicans have consolidated support among the less engaged, including the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/01/polls-accurate-nobody-answers-phones/">folks who don’t answer pollsters</a> and those <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/04/who-uses-libraries/">who avoid libraries</a>.

In previous eras, party coalitions often defined themselves by region. In that context, Jordan’s theory made sense. Not just for sneakers, obviously, but also for Meat Loaf and Maseratis and everything in between. When the parties split along lines that aren’t correlated as strongly with income, the folks with economic power can be found on both sides.

Even now, the split isn’t clean. Almost a quarter of folks with graduate degrees still lean Republican, and more than a third of high school graduates or dropouts lean Democratic. But the broader trend looms so large that we can learn a lot from education-specific data.

Education seems like a stellar proxy because, apart from income, nothing shows wider gaps in Americans’ spending habits than education levels, according to our analysis of BLS data. A family with at least one person who graduated from college spends about twice as much as their degree-free neighbors.

The spending gulf yawns so wide that we see only one major category where less-educated families outspend others: tobacco. And in that case, education-linked spending habits appear to translate easily to politics: A subsidiary of Reynolds American was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/18/menthol-cigarette-ban-trump-biden/" target="_blank">one of the largest Republican donors this cycle</a>, and Susie Wiles, whom Trump recently <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/07/trump-susie-wiles-chief-of-staff-cabinet/" target="_blank">anointed</a> as his chief of staff, <a href="https://kffhealthnews.org/morning-breakout/trumps-campaign-guru-a-tobacco-lobbyist-will-be-his-chief-of-staff/">worked as a tobacco lobbyist</a> while running his 2024 campaign.

In every other sector, from entertainment to insurance to alcohol, educated folks spend more. (Because we’re interested in each group’s sheer market power, we’re looking at total dollar amounts. If we instead calculated each group’s spending relative to their earnings, we’d see a similar pattern, but it would show that less-educated folks spend more of their income than their educated friends on major categories such as food, transportation, housing and health care.)

The biggest gap feels easiest to explain: More-educated Americans spend 5 dollars on education for every dollar spent by their neighbors who skipped college. It’s almost tautological, but it also reflects their increased access to — and prioritization of — private schools and America’s legendarily expensive system of higher learning.

The next most lopsided category, cash contributions, includes charitable and political donations. Educated Americans donate at more than three times the rate of their counterparts, which may help explain why the Harris campaign proved to be a record-busting <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/trump-harris-donors-zip-code-map/?itid=ap_claraencemorse" target=_blank>fundraising juggernaut</a>. (It may also help explain why culture wars loom so large in today’s politics; more on that later.)

The third category resides nearest and dearest to our heart: reading. More-educated folks spend three times as much on books, newspaper subscriptions, magazines and other physical or digital reading material.

It’s harder to translate this one directly to politics, but we can confirm it with other sources. NORC’s GSS, which we used to chart politics and education earlier, has been asking how often folks read newspapers since the mid-1970s, when about two-thirds of Americans did so daily. As of 2022, a majority of U.S. adults never open a paper (or perhaps even a news app or news website).

Of those who still read newspapers, Democrats made up a narrow majority in the 1990s and early 2000s, but their lead has turned into a rout. Now, among people who read the paper multiple times a week, Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2 to 1.

Look a little deeper, and you see that edge comes entirely from Democrats with college degrees. In fact, Democrats with advanced degrees are the only growing readership demographic out there. And by “growing” we mean that even this group, the last loyal newspaper readers in the country, are reading less often with every passing year — but their population keeps increasing so fast that it offsets any individual losses.

We wondered if the gap was only educational polarization or if other factors were also in play. Perhaps culture wars or Trump’s relentless broadsides against the “fake news media” have driven off Republican readers? Maybe.

Hold education constant, and you see Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to read newspapers until 2016. Then the two lines diverge. And at least half of that seems to be due to forces beyond simple educational polarization.

So would an outlet that appeals more to conservatives have slowed the bleeding? We’re not sure.

Even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, an outlet distinguished for both its studiously independent news coverage and pugnaciously conservative opinion pages, relies on Democrats to stay afloat. About 60 percent of the people who said they got political news from the Journal were Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents, according to Pew Research Center data from 2021.

Again, it seems to be a question of education. As the people with the cash and inclination to support fact-checked journalism move left, so do paying newspaper audiences. As education polarization has increased, the Republican Party has stepped up its attacks on scientific and academic expertise and the facts it produces.

Trump ran afoul of The Washington Post’s Fact Checker <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?itid=lk_inline_manual_11">more than 30,000 times during his presidency</a>, a mark we’d consider unbreakable had he not just won a second term and shown absolutely no signs of slowing down in this particular department.

How did truth get swept up in the culture wars? We called on the dudes who wrote “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Polarized-Degrees-Transformed-American-Politics-ebook/dp/B0DJHMJQ3Q/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zSQ4mszNWBt5LWn5bKr4iZTmpRJfm5V8DTUq4HiYkV5gayoiycYXz4-mOSv4qTICCOlT1n4M-GIw-tsDYUdKB5rBDHbyu281kz1msUOwiROumKftSKC_bnB_varQwjHqGR5GNgCV5W3FDMuWURREDoEAW7Uc4A43ID3nsl0TeG0LjQxy2NVirqCKIPx6-0Ncfjvo3To323CIYIdJbBf9hm_uS4RULEjtZMN3_IzqUUJc26j-E0TTdLia81QKU7TYlBMgwL_of6xOm_qpUCbuI53I_MvHixJcn2lOKiVpMUI.RYtZuLyM61H-o4C4Wip0FQ8ZtpLUWaXW4YSG4GAaWOU&qid=1730925393&sr=8-1">Polarized by Degrees</a>,” Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins, and they offered a beguilingly simple answer.

Educated folks make up the backbone of elite American institutions that determine facts, truth and the expert consensus, whether in entertainment, education or ecology. As the majority of those educated folks shift left, the institutions they helm will follow.

Grossmann, a Michigan State political scientist and senior fellow with the center-right-ish Niskanen Center, told us differences in opinion across the education divide show up primarily on cultural and social issues rather than economic policies.

“Income used to really divide the parties, but it does so less and less, and education does so more and more,” he said. “ … It’s actually people of low education and high income that have moved the furthest right, and people who are of high education but low income who have moved the furthest left.”

So, if we were to oversimplify a bit, we could say that not only are less-educated Americans shut out from most institutions, but they’re also more and more likely to see those institutions adopt politics and values different from their own.

Americans without a degree tend to lack the credentials and connections to change cultural institutions from the inside, using soft power. And because they earn and spend so much less than their educated friends, they don’t have the economic power to change institutions by voting with their dollars.

But there is one place where their vote still counts equally: politics.

While the share of voting-age Americans with a bachelor’s degree has doubled in the past 40 years, they remain a minority at 39 percent. So, the authors write, the noncollege majority — which actually has a minority of the money and a minority of the cultural influence — has turned to the main power lever within their reach: political force. And they’ve used it to change elite institutions the only way an outsider can, by tearing them down from the outside.

In this climate, educational polarization has turned every professionally staffed institution, from news to nonprofits, into a potential target.

Does that mean Democrats are doomed, trapped on the elite side of a culture war with the numbers against them? If anyone can calculate a way out, it would be data-driven rabble-rouser Elizabeth Pancotti at the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. When we called, she pointed to <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w31794" target=_blank>a recent analysis</a> that dug deep into historical opinion polls, going back to the 1940s, when <a href="https://www.gallup.com/corporate/178136/george-gallup.aspx" target=_blank>George Gallup</a> himself stood astride the industry like a colossus.

The researchers, Ilyana Kuziemko, Nicolas Longuet-Marx and Suresh Naidu, found that support for what we might call populist economic policies — ones that directly benefit workers, such as jobs guarantees, higher minimum wages, trade protectionism and strong unions — has remained relatively steady among less-educated Americans for as long as we’ve had polls to measure it.

But as Democrats courted more high-education, high-donation voters, they shifted away from that New Deal populism toward redistributive economic policies — ones in which the government chooses where the money goes, through taxes and benefits. Before the Trump era, that had already turned off many less-educated Americans, particularly those who believe they’ve earned their way into the middle class. So, they voted on culture-war issues instead.

“As Democrats moved to the center on economics, they lost the support of these hardworking, higher-earning Americans,” Pancotti said. “To win them back — or to at least win back enough to swing the vote — they just need to run more-populist candidates.”

Howdy! The Department of Data needs quantifiable queries now more than ever. What are you curious about: Has the gerontocracy come for business, or is it just a function of American politics? Do TV stations do better in swing states, thanks to political advertising? Which parts of America have the most aerial obstacles? <a href="https://thewashingtonpost.formstack.com/forms/department_of_data_questions">Just ask!</a>

If your question inspires a column, we’ll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card.

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Andrew Van Dam writes the Department of Data column each week for The Washington Post. He has covered economics and wrangled data and graphics for The Post and the Wall Street Journal. 

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