With Donald Trump insisting that candidates support his cause in this year’s midterm elections, Republicans may wonder whether doing so can win over young voters. In past presidential elections, exit polls have found that Republicans have been losing their share of the two-party vote among adults ages of 18 through 24. In 2000, George W. Bush won 48 percent of young adults, and he won more than 40 percent in 2004; in 2020, Trump won just 30 percent.
Since the nation’s voters have been increasingly divided by education — with the college-educated identifying less as Republicans and those without college moving away from Democrats — we wanted to know whether that was also true for Trump’s share of the young. We found that young Republicans with a college degree were least likely to vote for Trump, while young Republicans without a college education gave him their votes. Young college Republicans seem to have been turned away by the former president’s rhetoric on race.
Here’s how we did our research
We analyzed the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), the largest academic survey focused on American elections with a sample of 61,000 American adults, to investigate this divide. We focused on the approximately 1,700 Republicans and 3,500 Democrats ages 18 to 25. In 2020, 51 percent of this group were either attending college or had recently received a college degree. We considered them as a single group, referred to as “young college students.”
How did young college students differ politically from youths without a college education? Perhaps unsurprisingly, young college students voted for Joe Biden at a rate 10 percentage points higher than their non-college peers. But the divide was more complicated if we looked just at those who identified with one party or the other. Young Democrats voted overwhelmingly for Biden, regardless of whether they attended college. By contrast, Republicans with no college voted overwhelmingly for Trump, but about 18 percent of young college Republicans did not. That’s true even though young college Republicans supported Republican House candidates at equal rates as their non-college counterparts.
Why did college Republicans abandon Trump (and only Trump)?
We looked a bit deeper to see which attitudes in particular were related to this rejection. College and non-college young Republicans hold similar positions on a number of key issues, including climate change, gun control and anti-discrimination measures. But they differ on several others. For instance, young Republicans who have not attended college are more likely to support increasing the minimum wage than their college counterparts. That’s true even though Republican politicians and leaders have opposed minimum wage increases for decades.
We also see strong divides on the issues that Trump emphasized: those associated with White resentment about race. Young college Republicans are much more likely than their non-college counterparts to acknowledge that Whites have advantages in the United States and that historical conditions have made it difficult for Black Americans to succeed. Fully 39 percent of young college Republicans believe that compared with just 24 percent of young non-college Republicans.
College doesn’t make young people more liberal
Republican politicians see patterns like this and sometimes assume that universities coerce young conservatives to change their political ideals. In June, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis characterized universities as “intellectually repressive environments” that promote some “orthodoxies” while “other viewpoints are shunned or even suppressed.”
But we didn’t find any support for the claim that higher education liberalizes students. For example, we found that 73 percent of students who were just starting college — those who were 18 or 19 years old in 2020 — already agreed that Whites have advantages in the United States because of the color of their skin. Among those who were just completing college — students and degree holders who were 22 or 23 years old — 74 percent agreed with the same statement.
Republicans no longer support multiethnic democracy, our research shows
In some ways, this finding is surprising. A few decades ago, going to college reduced White Americans’ racist beliefs. In recent research, however, sociologist Geoffrey Wodtke finds that going to college is no longer associated with substantial changes in beliefs about structural racism. As Americans’ racial attitudes have changed over the past few decades, going to college no longer seems to make that much of a difference.
Rather, the types of people who have the opportunity and inclination to attend college in the first place apparently have different beliefs on race than their counterparts who do not. That appears to be true among young Republicans, as with other Americans. Rural Americans, a group Trump overwhelmingly won in 2020, are less likely to attend college than urban and suburban Americans.
It’s possible that as an increasing number of Republicans think universities are hurting society, their children may reject the idea of attending college themselves. The diploma divide in recent American politics may widen during the coming years.
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Pia Deshpande (@DeshpandePia) is a predoctoral research associate at the Cooperative Election Study and a former data journalist.
Zachary Hertz (@zacharylhertz) is a master’s student studying quantitative methods and social analysis at the University of Chicago.
Brian Schaffner (@b_schaffner) is Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies at Tufts University and co-PI of the Cooperative Election Study.