To Win Swing States, Kamala Harris Must Overcome the Diploma Divide

Vice President Kamala Harris has easily won over the well-educated progressives of the modern Democratic Party. The question is whether she can siphon enough non college-educated voters from Donald Trump in swing states to win election as president.
Politics in the 21st century has been defined by the Democratic Party’s growing appeal amongst voters with college degrees while a Republican Party, once seen as representing the elite, has built support among working class voters who did not attend college.
“Education, while I think it is the fault line, it also is a proxy for the cultural divide in our country,” Doug Sosnik, a senior advisor to former President Bill Clinton, told Newsweek. “The leadership of the Democratic Party is disproportionately Washington-based and disproportionately college educated, and they have a different set of priorities and issues than the rest of the country, and I think that has been a problem for Democrats across the country.”
Of the 35 percent of Americans with a college degree, 61 percent voted for Biden in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, while 53 percent of those without a college degree favored for Trump.
Former Democratic Presidential candidate and progressive leader, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has ideas on where Harris should start to overcome the diploma divide.
“The average American worker today is probably worse off than he or she was 50 years ago,” Sanders told Newsweek. “So, if you speak to the needs of the working class, if you have enough courage to take on the greed of corporate America and deal with the outrageous level of income and wealth inequality, you can bring in a large group of people from many different backgrounds.”
Sanders stressed that issues such as climate change and abortion are also of vital importance but said, “in terms of politics,” the wealth issue serves as a unifying force.
In campaigning, Harris has repeatedly pledged to “take on” big corporations, echoing President Joe Biden’s message of addressing inequality and high prices by requiring those entities to pay their “fair share.”
This has coincided with recent polling by the New York Times/Siena College that shows the VP besting Trump by four points in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — three swing states she needs to clinch the presidency and where the blue-collar vote is key.
The Trump campaign has stuck with a message clearly designed to resonate with the party’s working-class supporters and has focused on the economy.
“Voters are often faced with the question, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ The answer is clearly NO,” Steven Cheung, Trump Campaign Communications Director, wrote in an August 14 statement.
Newsweek contacted the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment.
Sosnik agreed with Sanders that it was also essential for Harris to focus on working class concerns, but he noted that the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are all toward the center of the list of most educated states. That requires messaging that can cut across the educational divide.
When it comes to Trump’s appeal among the working class, Sosnik believes it is largely cultural. While Trump slashed corporate taxes, Biden has brought investment in infrastructure and green energy that have created thousands of blue-collar jobs.
Nonetheless, Trump remains the favorite with non-college-educated voters.
One step Harris may have taken to bridging the cultural divide is by appointing Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Sosnik said.
“The problem that Democrats have had for a long time with these voters is that these college-educated, elite Democrats are probably sitting around in conference rooms on either the east coast or the west coast, and they’re sitting there trying to figure out how to talk to these people,” Sosnik said. “Probably one of the main reasons she picked Walz is she basically picked ‘one of us,’ so he doesn’t have to sit around a conference room trying to figure out what these people think — That’s where he comes from.”
Walz’ robust legislative record in solidly blue Minnesota; bolstering transgender rights, funding free school lunches, and passing abortion right protections; also makes him a favorite among progressives.
Jennifer Hochschild, a government, public policy, and African American studies professor at Harvard University, said Walz acts as a political “Rorschach test,” who voters can view in many ways, a trait shared by Harris.
Hochschild said Harris’ record and priorities paint a complex picture that can’t be easily pinned down.
She sees this complexity as a way of undercutting Trump’s grip on the culture that surrounds American politics, allowing her to unite the country by bridging the diploma divide.
“Harris, I think, is trying to combine a relatively pro law and order public comity, pro American, patriotic persona with a pretty strong feminist persona, particularly around issues of abortion,” she told Newsweek. “The gender issues and abortion are highly salient to well-educated Democrats, and the safety, patriotism persona is aimed, it seems to be, at the less well-educated democratic constituency, so I think that’s her answer.”
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