This election has made all the so-called political experts look like fools. Most of us thought that Trump would not enter the presidential race at all, that if he did he could not win the Republican nomination, and that if he nonetheless managed all that, he would still lose to Hillary Clinton in a wipeout. Yet here we are, just weeks to go, and Clinton’s lead over the real estate mogul is extremely modest.
How could we have been so wrong? The answer one hears from Trump supporters is that this is a symptom of corruption. The experts are tools of the establishment and thus cannot appreciate how Trump speaks to and for the “real America.” But this account is tendentious, and it overlooks the fact that conservative intellectuals have been some of the most pointed critics of the established order in American politics. Indeed, it is doubtful that Trump himself thought he would get this far. Stephanie Cegielski, a former strategist for the pro-Trump Make America Great Again super-PAC, claims to have been told by the candidate’s advisers that “the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in delegate count.”
The better explanation is that accurate predictions require some correspondence between the past and the present, and this has been lacking in 2016. Put bluntly: This year is just so strange that prognosticators have been befuddled. Trump has taken advantage of widespread public frustration to exploit otherwise latent cleavages in American politics to create a new, unpredictable dynamic.
Wariness of the government is more pervasive now than in any cycle in recent memory—and this has surely fueled Trump’s rise. He was able to run against the entire GOP during the primary, in part because Republican voters are so unhappy with their own party. All things being equal, nobody would expect conservatives to back a candidate who once considered himself more of a Democrat than a Republican, or who wouldn’t rule out running as an independent. But all things aren’t equal. Conservatives don’t trust Republican politicians to behave like good Republicans anymore; meanwhile, Trump has, at the least, been frank about his past heresies and his ambitions. Better to go with the businessman who openly disagrees with you than the politician you suspect is just telling you what you want to hear.
Trust is essential to stability in republican government. If voters do not believe politicians are being square with them, the bonds connecting the people to their government degrade, citizens feel disempowered and become liable to adopting extreme remedies. This is one reason Trump won the nomination.
As for the general election, the Trump-Clinton battle has opened a previously dormant factional division in the United States: education. Nonwhite voters will assuredly break heavily to Clinton, regardless of education status. But the divide among white voters seems to strongly correlate with the highest level of education attained.
Republicans have done well in recent cycles with whites lacking college degrees, but Trump appears set to do much better. This helps account for why he has polling leads in Iowa, Ohio, and even Maine’s Second Congressional District. On the other hand, Trump is lagging behind Mitt Romney’s margin among college-educated whites, which explains why Pennsylvania looks to remain Democratic, Virginia appears out of Trump’s grasp, and North Carolina is still a toss-up. Under the “normal” rules of politics, we would expect Iowa, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to move in concert, but with this new educational divide among white voters, there is a surprising divergence.
The educational divide is not reducible to matters of style, either. For generations, policymakers have systematically encouraged Americans to go to college and enter the professional, “white-collar” workforce. This has changed the demography of the nation at least as much as the influx of immigrants and the securing of voting rights for African Americans. The result of these forces is a profoundly diverse electorate. In 1948 almost all of the country looked like the average Trump voter. But no longer. Yet, while the preponderance of the white working class has slowly disappeared, this cohort remains an electoral force to be reckoned with.
Trump is a candidate who speaks to their particular grievances. His protectionist views on trade are a signal that, in his view, making America great again means returning the manufacturing worker to his old pride of place. To those with a college degree, this is hardly appealing, but for those whose families did not transition from blue to white collar, it sounds like common sense.
Realignments such as this are hard to grasp fully while they are happening. Usually, we have to wait until the dust settles to see what actually occurred. The particulars of this new educational fault line also create a unique problem for political analysts, who sample almost entirely from the educated class. It is hard for them to intuit the appeal of Trump, so it has been easy to be surprised by him, again and again.
Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
