GOP went downscale populist.

Democrats lost the White working class.  Their Party left them.

Republicans lost the White college educated. Their Party left them, too.

Like a lot of things in American politics, it goes back to the 1960's and the culture war. 

Commentary, including this blog, has examined the dismay of Democrats. In past decades Democrats did not just lose the "Solid South;" they lost the White working class in the North. Youth agitation in opposition to the Vietnam War triggered backlash from blue collar voters of the WW2 generation. It wasn't about money or share of national income. Economically, this was the best of times for America's blue collar workers. Working class Americans were angry about style and attitude. It was hardhats vs. hippies and anti-war protesters. It was the opening salvos of a culture war that is still going on.

Marketers labeled it the "Generation Gap." Jefferson Airplane sang "One generation got old; One generation got soul." The young seemed disrespectful, unpatriotic, rebellious--and it was intentional. Jefferson Airplane, again:

     "We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent----and young."

Those "hardhat" Democrats felt out of place in the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton was a clean cut establishment version of the unpatriotic, disrespectful youth generation, but he was one of them. Non-college construction workers and truck drivers and blue collar workers, especially the men, didn't like the company Democrats kept inside the party--Blacks, women, gays, the unchurched all calling for social change--and somehow accusing those White men for being part of the problem. Democratic officeholders didn't call them out for condemnation, not well enough. Oh, there was a Sister Soulja moment here and there, but day in and day out, Democratic leaders seemed actually to agree with the aspirations of those groups. The White working class wanted out.

Meanwhile, Republicans.

"Hardhat" counterdemonstration

Nixon succeeded politically by choosing the side of the "Silent Majority" in that fight, but the real spokesman for culture war was George Wallace. His political heir was Republican Pat Buchanan, who lost to George HW Bush, but whose cause of old fashioned patriotic and cultural indignation festered. John McCain used Joe the Plumber as the symbol of the resentment, but it was Sarah Palin who exemplified working class populism fully. She did not know much, but she was proudly who she was, and she knew that she disliked experts and liberal, latte-sipping snobs. That led to Donald Trump.

Once again, some voters are uncomfortable with the company they are keeping--this time Republicans. College classmate Jeffrey Lauranti drew my attention to the political cost of the GOP becoming a populist party. The people up for grabs in 2020 aren't really those "suburban housewives" afraid that Cory Booker might move into their neighborhoods. It is the nonvoters among the White working class. They are Trump's people, which means those college educated suburbanites are not.

After college, Jeff Laurenti studied international relations and public policy at Princeton and then had a long career doing foreign policy analysis and advocacy. He was a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation.

Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti

"There are surely a number of factors whose confluence has produced the suddenly yawning gap after 2012 in voting preferences between white college graduates and non-graduates. Looking at the Pew data, the decisive lurch toward Republicans among white voters without a college degree occurred in 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration -- certainly not a time of great economic distress. Indeed, in Democratic circles there was much self-congratulation about having successfully turned the tables on the old Republican issue of fiscal deficits, since Clinton was running federal budget surpluses.

College educated White voters are Democrats now

One might conclude that this large chunk of the electorate, however, was unimpressed by "New Democrat" economics: Democrats have made little headway among whites without a college degree in any of the 21st century presidential elections, losing this demographic by some 20 to 25 percentage points each time around after holding a narrow lead in the 1990s. Or maybe it had nothing to do with economics at all.

Perhaps this headlong rush of the non-college educated into the open arms of the Republican Party perversely may itself have contributed to the astonishing spike in Democratic voting preferences among the college-educated since 2015. I have long thought that John McCain's 2008 selection of Sarah Palin as his choice for vice-president, plus his elevation of "Joe the Plumber" in October of that year as the totem of his target voter, would prove the watershed moment in the re-branding of the Republican Party. Till then it had been the party of successful people, of people the upwardly aspiring college-educated middle classes could admire and want to emulate--people like George Bush, John McCain, and even Richard Cheney.

Joe the Plumber and Sarah the Veep were not cut from this cloth. Their face of the Republican Party became more visible in the 2010 "Tea Party" insurgency, and while old-school Mitt Romney contained them in 2012, they were still stewing in their own bile waiting for their moment. The GOP's post-Romney "autopsy" identified an urgent need to reach out to the new demographics if the Party was not to be consigned nationally to the dustbin of history the way it had been in California and the Northeast; the Party's low-education base would have none of it, and found its champion in Donald Trump.

While Trump has largely placated the plutocratic imperatives of the Party's donor class, there is no doubt that he has embraced the Party's lower-education voters as its core. You have to wonder whether the gun-carrying, MAGA-cap wearing brawlers whom the public sees flocking to Trump rallies have become the know-nothing face of today's Republican Party -- and whether they are not themselves a big part of what is propelling the college-educated middle classes to the Democrats."