White Voters in Swing-State Counties Send the GOP a Warning

One of the great reveals of the 2020 presidential election is the staying power, even in defeat, of Trumpism. At the same time, the outcome is exposing its political limitations in a rapidly changing America.

While President Donald Trump managed to pull in more support from his core constituency—rural, non-college-educated voters—than he had four years earlier in some key swing states, he lost his re-election bid because urban, college-educated voters swung toward Joe Biden in overwhelming numbers. And in a country that is steadily becoming more diverse, urban and better educated, the data sends a clear warning to a Republican party that seems unlikely to separate itself from Trump and his populist brand of politics anytime soon.

“Metropolitan counties, whether they are the central city or in the surrounding suburbs, have all shifted” away from Trump, said Charles Stewart, a political science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “People who have college degrees who are not the top earners, and are also younger, have internalized a set of values that cause them to recoil at Trump’s behavior.”

In the 13 swing states that turned the 2020 presidential election into a nail biter, suburban and urban counties with the highest share of college educated White people supported Biden by 4.4 more points than they did Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the latest available vote counts from the Associated Press. Those gains were especially pronounced in battleground states, including longtime Republican strongholds Arizona and Georgia, that Biden appears to have reclaimed for the Democratic Party.

By contrast, Trump made gains in rural counties with large shares of non-college-educated White people. These increases, though, were smaller than the ones he scored for the Republican Party in 2016, and the inability to swell those numbers further undercut his campaign’s chances in those states. For instance, in Michigan, a state Biden appears to have flipped, Trump only picked up an additional 2.3 points from those voters. (Back in 2016, he had scored an 11-point surge when compared to the party’s 2012 performance.) In nearby Pennsylvania, such counties actually moved slightly toward Biden.

In swing-state counties with a majority of college-educated White people, Trump’s average margin of victory shrank by 1.8 points, a big change from 2016, when he boosted the margin for Republicans by a staggering 12 points in those areas.

Though nearly half of majority-White counties moved away from Trump this year, the Republican party could win those voters back if they put forward more a more traditional conservative standard bearer who also embraces fewer regulations and more tax cuts, according to Stewart.

“There’s a lot of White college-educated individuals in the heartland of America,” said Stewart. “Having a more traditional Republican who behaved better could be very attractive to people.”