Today's 'rock-ribbed Republican' is white, didn't graduate college, earns more than $77,000

(Image credit: John Rudoff/AFP/Getty Images)

last updated 29 August 2019

President Trump, more than any recent president, governs with a near-monomaniacal focus on what he thinks his base wants, especially on race, immigration, and their avatar, the wall. See, for example, this recent email from his 2020 re-election campaign:

But who is Trump's base? White voters with less formal education, certainly — that demographic now makes up 59 percent of GOP voters, from 50 percent in 2010, while whites with college degrees shrank from 40 percent of the GOP to 29 percent, the biggest shift happening from 2016 to 2018, Thomas Edsall writes in The New York Times. But according to research from political scientists Herbert Kitschelt (Duke) and Philipp Rehm (Ohio State), Trump's base isn't the "white working class," or lower-income white voters without college degrees, Edsall explains:

Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes — in the top two quintiles of the income distribution — but without college degrees, a constituency that is now decisively committed to the Republican Party. According to the census, the top two income quintiles in 2017 were made up of those with household incomes above $77,552. ...Low-income whites without college degrees have moved to the Republican Party, but because they frequently hold liberal economic views — that is, they support redistributionist measures from which they benefit — they are conflicted in their partisan allegiance. [Edsall, The New York Times]

Both groups of non-college white voters "tend to endorse authoritarian policies on the noneconomic dimension," Kitschelt and Rehm write, but the blue-collar non-college whites swung to Trump because they viewed him as "substantially more moderate than his party," mostly due to his pledge to protect Medicare and Social Security. The higher-income non-college whites — small business owners, shopkeepers, some salaried worker — are the new "rock-ribbed Republicans," Edsall writes, while "the most loyal white Democratic constituency" is low-income whites with college degrees.

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Read Edsall's entire analysis at The New York Times for more about how views on race and religion shape white voters, and how the demographic trends are skewing away from the GOP.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.