College Education and Changing Party Affiliation During the Obama Years

• In Event: The Centrality of Race in Public Opinion

Abstract

Trump's success among non-college educated White voters in 2016 brought attention to a change in the relationship between education and party affiliation: The Republican Party had long attracted more college-educated Whites, but now the relationship was reversed. However, less attention has been paid to whether this is a result of Trump's unique policies and rhetoric, or a continuation of trends that predated his presidency. Using 11 waves of nationally-representative panel data from 2007-2016 I investigate the changes in the relationship between college education and party affiliation during the Obama presidency. I find that White Americans were dividing based on level of education long before Trump was the Republican nominee. I evaluate two existing explanations for why college-education Americans shifted to the Democrats and non-college Americans shifted to the Republicans during this time period and suggest a new theory based on a measure of perceptions of unfair preferential treatment. White Americans without a college education were more worried than those with college degrees about Black Americans receiving preferential treatment from the US government before Obama even became the Democratic nominee. Those who were more concerned about favoritism towards Black Americans were more likely to switch to the Republican Party. This suggests the value of measuring perceptions of group conflict to understand contemporary racial animus.

Author

• Alexander Tolkin, University of Pennsylvania