Why Donald Trump's war against eggheads is backfiring

Donald Trump is losing badly among college-educated voters. If this continues, he's doomed.

Mess with the eggheads and you'll get yolked.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Eric Thayer)

Campaigning for president in 1952, Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson was told by an enthusiastic voter that he had the support of every thinking person in the country. "That's not enough, madam," Stevenson supposedly answered. "We need a majority." Since those were the dark days before smartphones and Snapchat when a candidate could have an unrecorded conversation with a voter, we don't know for sure if it actually happened that way. But the story certainly resonated with Stevenson's image as an "egghead" too loftily intellectual to connect with the common folk.

In the years since, Democrats never stopped nominating intellectual candidates, not so much because that's what they thought the country wanted, but because that's what they themselves were attracted to. So there was an enduring contradiction: Democrats wanted to be simultaneously the party of the working person and the party of intellectuals. It was a contradiction Republicans exploited mercilessly, fostering resentment at the intellectual and cultural elite as a way of shifting focus from the economic elite on whose behalf they always labored. Don't worry about those tax cuts for the wealthy, they said, what you should really be angry about is a professor of ethnic studies no one has ever heard of who said something ridiculous. Those limousine liberals look down their nose at you and your small-town lowbrow ways, don't you know? Pull the lever for us, and you'll really show 'em.

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.