Politico’s Jonathan Martin has identified the fatal flaw in Nikki Haley’s already long-shot bid to displace Donald Trump from his perch at the top of the polls.
In a dispatch that conveys the author’s distaste for both the Republican Party’s perfunctory exercise in primary politics and the mechanical way in which Donald Trump’s opponents have gone through the motions in their inexorable march toward defeat, Martin identified through a collection of anecdotes Haley’s Achilles heel. “I struggled to find a single attendee in the suburban strip mall tavern who was not a college graduate,” he wrote of his impressions from a Haley campaign stop in Iowa. “Similarly, the day before, I couldn’t find a Haley admirer who showed up to see her in Sioux City who was not also a college graduate.”
The Republican Party in the age of Trump has supposedly given up on what was once the GOP’s bread and butter: reliable suburban voters with high incomes and college degrees. To a particular sort of Republican reformer, making the Republican Party into a vehicle for working-class politics isn’t just sound strategy. It’s a campaign of conscience designed to mute the influence of a class whose exposure to higher education has rendered them disconnected, effete, and indifferent to the struggles endured by the majority of Americans who never pursued a college degree. The attribution of a peculiar virtue to the abstracted proletarian ideal perhaps compensates for this demographic’s low voting propensity.
The assumption embedded in Martin’s observation is that electoral politics is a zero-sum game for the GOP when it comes to education levels. The Republican candidate who attracts more degree-holders will sacrifice his or her appeal to voters who do not possess that piece of paper. Trump owns the non-college Republican voter, it is believed. And in the Republican Party’s cultural civil war, that advantage can be used as a cudgel to bludgeon his competitors out of the political arena. That also explains the flourish that closes Martin’s insouciant dispatch in which he suggests Haley’s early-state surge is the fabrication of a bored press corps. After all, that tavern “had as many reporters and photographers as voters.”
Can we test Martin’s proposition, backing his observations up with data? Oddly enough, given the lateness of the hour, we don’t have a lot of recent primary polling data from Iowa to parse. We certainly don’t have many surveys with crosstabs that identify the characteristics associated with each candidate’s voters. But we do have some.
A Fox News-sponsored poll of Iowa Republicans conducted in mid December found Trump dominating the field with 52 percent support — a prohibitive position relative to Ron DeSantis’s 18 percent and Haley’s 16 percent. But what about those education levels? The Fox poll found that 19 percent of degree-holders backed Haley while 24 percent supported DeSantis. But with 42 percent, Donald Trump attracts the backing of far more degree-holders than either of his opponents.
Among non-degree holders, Haley attracts 13 percent while DeSantis wins 14 percent — a smaller percentage relative to their support among educated voters, but not a vast one. At 61 percent, Trump maintains the support of the vast majority of voters without a college degree, but an intrepid reporter tallying the education levels among Trump rallygoers is likely to come away with mixed results.
The story is much the same in New Hampshire. A CNN/University of New Hampshire poll found the race in the Granite State tightening, with Trump leading at 39 percent and Haley at 32 percent. There, the education divide isn’t especially pronounced. Haley can count on the support of 39 percent of degree-holders and 41 percent of those with a post-graduate education. But she also attracts the backing of 31 percent of New Hampshire Republicans who did not attend college and 24 percent of voters with only some college education. Donald Trump won the backing of 46 percent of high-school-educated Granite Staters and 45 percent of voters with a vocational education or only some college, but a quarter of post-grads and 27 percent of degree-holders also count themselves in Trump’s camp.
The data are too sparse to draw too definitive conclusions one way or the other about the extent to which education levels are predictive of Republican voters’ candidate preferences. But the notion that anti-Trump candidates in the race for the Republican presidential nomination are vying for “the pre-Trump stub that’s overwhelmingly college-educated” is complicated by the data we do have. And to the extent that sorting pro-and anti-Trump Republicans into camps defined by education levels reinforces a belief among Trump’s critics that the former president’s backers are simply unenlightened, the observation obscures more than it illuminates.