Education-Level Voting Gaps Are Highest Among Men, White People

College-educated and college-aged voters overwhelmingly favored Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, exit polls show.

The divide in the political preferences of college-educated voters and those without a college degree has grown in the last decade, concerning higher education leaders who have said the gap reflects political polarization. They say the divide could fuel perceptions that colleges are out of touch with average Americans and shows a need to ensure that higher education is accessible to people from all backgrounds.

While college-educated voters were more likely to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris than Donald Trump across all demographics, that gap is greatest among white voters and men. Women, Black people and Hispanic people generally voted similarly regardless of their educational background.

Over all, college graduates—which, in the exit polls conducted by Edison Research in collaboration with the National Election Pool, means individuals with a bachelor’s or advanced degree—made up 43 percent of the electorate this year. Of that group, 55 percent voted for Vice President Kamala Harris and 42 percent voted for Donald Trump. The numbers were almost exactly reversed among those who hadn’t graduated college, 42 percent of whom voted for Harris and 56 percent of whom voted for Trump.

Edison Research conducted the exit polls on behalf of several news organizations, including NBC News, and provided data to Inside Higher Ed.

College graduates’ preferences for Democratic candidates is a relatively new phenomenon, developing only in the past decade or so. But since then, that group’s support for Democrats has grown significantly. According to data from the American Council on Education, less than 10 years ago 50 percent of voters with a college degree voted for Republicans while 48 percent voted for Democrats, but in 2016, the majority of college-educated voters, 55 percent, voted for Democrats, while 43 percent backed Republicans. In 2022, about 46 percent of those with college degrees voted for Republicans while 52 percent voted for Democrats.

The shift has accompanied changing perceptions—and increasing vilification by some Republicans—that colleges and universities are bastions of liberal ideology where students are indoctrinated into left-wing thinking and punished for expressing differing opinions. (Conservative students do report feeling less comfortable sharing their political opinions with classmates, and right-wing speakers are more likely to get shouted down on campuses; on the other hand, colleges have been forced in recent years to scale back or eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and pressured to punish student protesters.)

This year, the gap was especially stark among men. While a nearly equal number of college-educated men voted for each candidate (49 percent of their votes went to Harris and 48 percent to Trump), Trump led Harris by a whopping 24 points among non-college-educated men.

Responses from white voters told a similar story. While Harris was seven percentage points more popular than Trump among white college-educated voters, only 32 percent of white non-college-educated voters voted for Harris and 66 percent voted for Trump.

Black voters, on the other hand, voted at nearly identical rates for Harris regardless of whether they had graduated college (86 percent) or not (85 percent). The same was true of Hispanic voters—53 percent of Hispanic college graduates chose Harris versus 51 percent of those who are not college graduates. (Education aside, Trump did make major gains in both of these demographics as compared to 2020.)

Though there was a significant difference in how college-educated and non-college-educated women voted, it was less substantial than for men. Harris won non-college-educated women voters by a margin of eight points; 61 percent of college-educated women selected Harris and 37 percent selected Trump, whereas 53 percent of non-college-educated women voted for Harris and 45 percent voted for Trump. Those differences were much greater among white women; white women who didn’t graduate from college favored Trump by 28 percentage points.

Edison Research did not ask respondents whether they were current college students, but respondents in the 18 to 24 age range were, unsurprisingly, more likely to vote for Harris (54 percent) than Trump (42 percent). But the gap in 2024 narrowed compared to 2020, when Trump was able to court only 35 percent of young people.

This time around, Trump won male voters ages 18 to 29 by two percentage points. Meanwhile, 61 percent of women in that age range voted for Harris and only 37 percent voted for Trump.

Some pundits have blamed Harris’s loss, and the shift in Trump’s popularity among young men, on Gen Z men who have been radicalized by right-wing influencers and podcasts, as such content has exploded in popularity in recent years. But other experts caution against the idea that any one factor can account for the results of the election.

“I have read hundreds of articles and social media posts assigning blame or credit for the election outcome to this group or that person,” Nancy Thomas, executive director of the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Soon, we will know more about long lines and other suppressive voting tactics. Or unfavorable weather. Or whether young people cared more about the economy than the environment. We’ll also want to factor in disinformation, unfettered social media, unjustified fear or hate of ‘others,’ and the influence of money.”

Thomas cautioned that “this will take months to sort out,” and even then, it may be difficult to identify specific causes.

“These numbers make me curious about what influences [voters], especially intersectional factors of race, gender, age, educational attainment, wealth, and geography, and their implications for education and for democracy,” she wrote. “The point is, there’s a lot to consider.”

(This story has been updated to fix errors in the data from Edison Research, which they discovered after publication.)