Trump's Achilles Heel: White College Voters

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Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are struggling to rebuild their respective winning coalitions. After exploring Biden’s weakness with Hispanic voters last week, we turn to Trump’s most glaring vulnerability: college-educated white voters. From Iowa to Super Tuesday, Trump performed worst in counties with higher proportions of these critical voters. The one county he lost in Iowa? Johnson County—the state’s most educated. The three counties Nikki Haley won in South Carolina? The Palmetto State’s most educated. 

Interestingly, Haley’s performance—largely representative of the non-Trump vote—also positively correlates with the 2016-2020 Democratic swing. In other words, Haley did best, and Trump worst, in places that trended left between the last two presidential elections. This suggests that Trump is struggling to reclaim Trump 2016-Biden 2020 voters, especially those with college degrees. Polling supports this theory: recent averages have Biden winning white college voters by 15 points, even as Trump leads overall. 

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In analyzing Haley’s vote share, there remains one necessary caveat. We still don’t know the proportion of her primary supporters who will “come home” to Trump—or how many were really Democrats all along. But exit polling does suggest that many college-educated Haley voters, regardless of their ideological lean, simply won’t vote for Trump in November. If this holds, expect the already-huge gap between white college and non-college voters to expand to historic levels.