The Overlooked Demographic That Is a Huge Opportunity for Democrats

In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago, vice presidential nominee Tim Walz introduced himself to the nation with the kind of up-from-humble-origins life story that American politicians have deployed for generations, but with a partisan twist. “Now, I grew up in Butte, Nebraska, a town of 400 people,” he began. “I had 24 kids in my high school class, and none of them went to Yale.”

The Yale reference was an obvious jab at his vice presidential opponent, Sen. JD Vance, who famously attended that Ivy League university after a hardscrabble childhood in Appalachia before working as a corporate lawyer and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Walz contrasted that with his own story: joining the National Guard at 17, attending college on the GI Bill (which Vance did as well) and sticking around the small-town Midwest to become a high school teacher and football coach. He lashed out at Vance again in a Labor Day speech in Erie, Pennsylvania: “You go off to Yale, you get a philosophy major, write a best-selling book, trash the very people you grew up with, just don’t come back to Erie and tell us how to run our lives.”

There is something new, and potentially profound, in this sort of attack. For decades, Republicans have successfully portrayed Democrats as out-of-touch elitists. Walz is trying to flip that well-thumbed script by framing his Republican opponent as the patronizing sophisticate and himself as the regular guy who went to colleges no one’s heard of and made his career in the region where he was born. It’s a clever rhetorical tactic. But more than that, it has the makings of a larger political strategy.

Walz’s populist rhetoric can be read as an appeal to a certain long-overlooked demographic, which he himself represents: the “state college voter.” These are Americans who, while college educated, didn’t leave home to attend fancy colleges like Harvard or Yale. Instead, they mostly studied at what are called “regional public universities”: not the flagship state universities but unassuming institutions whose names have the word “State” in them (California State University-Fullerton) or refer to their location (Northern Illinois University). Instead of pursing lucrative jobs in distant coastal metropolises, they generally built their careers near where they grew up, earning more modest incomes but contributing their tax dollars and civic energies to their home regions. They comprise a far bigger share of the electorate than those who went to elite colleges. But as a group they have been almost completely ignored politically, until Walz came on the national scene. Understanding who these voters are, what makes them tick and how to reach out to them could make a difference in this razor-close election.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency by playing to the grievances, and winning the support, of voters without college degrees — “I love the poorly educated” he famously said during the campaign. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by cleaning up among voters with college degrees.

It’s these results that have pundits and scholars gripped by the growing “diploma divide,” with college-educated, technocratic-minded, socially progressive voters increasingly moving to — and dominating the agenda of — the Democratic Party and less educated, socially conservative voters angry about globalization and dismissive of scientific expertise taking over the GOP.

While the concept of an educational realignment pitting liberal elite college grads against high school-educated conservatives captures a real and important phenomenon, it also glosses over a complex reality.

For one thing, college-educated Americans are no longer some rarefied minority. More than 37 percent of Americans 25 and older have at least a bachelor’s degree. Another 10 percent have an associate’s degree. About 5 percent have a vocational certificate , typically earned at a community or for-profit college. An additional 10 percent fall into the “some college, no degree” category. All told, more than 60 percent of adult Americans have spent time — typically years — inside a college classroom. They are the new American majority.

Even if we limit the definition of “college educated” to those with four-year degrees, it’s a stretch to call most of them elites. Only about 5 percent went to highly selective private universities like Harvard and Duke, or to high-status liberal arts colleges like Haverford or Oberlin.

The plurality of four-year degree holders — upward of 45 percent — attended regional public universities. These institutions are largely unknown outside their states, drawing most of their students from within a 100-mile radius of the campus. They admit most applicants, serve a predominantly middle- to working-class demographic, and graduate students who, on average, go on to earn good but not spectacular incomes. Regional publics are not, to be blunt, the colleges to which wealthy and ambitious parents urge their kids to apply.

Though regional public universities, together with nonselective private colleges, produce the lion’s share of four-year degrees in America, they tend not to be part of national debates about higher education. Instead, elite institutions are the overwhelming focus of those discussions. This is largely because the people who set the national agenda — members of Congress, CEOs, nonprofit leaders and journalists at national media outlets — disproportionately attended elite universities.

You see this bias reflected in various college rankings that attempt to define “excellence” in higher education. The top 100 national universities on the U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” list include only three regional public universities. (By contrast, 16 regional publics are among the top 100 national universities ranked by the Washington Monthly, the magazine I edit that measures colleges by their public benefits rather than selectivity.)

This myopia toward the nonselective colleges where most students get their degrees leads to an unconscious assumption that the agendas and activities of elite colleges are a stand-in for all of higher education, when in fact there are considerable cultural and political differences.

Affirmative action, a dominant issue on highly selective campuses, isn’t much of one at regional public universities. The simple reason is that the latter don’t have exclusive admissions policies, so their student bodies more naturally represent the diversity of their regions. The Gaza protests that broke out last spring happened overwhelmingly at highly selective colleges and were rare at open access schools like regional public universities. And while most campuses lean left, that’s less true of regional publics. At Columbia University, for example, there are 5.6 liberal students for every one conservative student, whereas at the University of Texas at El Paso there are only 2.3 liberal students for every conservative student.

Because of their lower profile and perceived status, regional public universities are disadvantaged in battles for funding . They receive, on average, $1,091 (or about 10 percent) less state funding per student than do public flagships, according to the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges . They also garner fewer federal research dollars and have smaller endowments. This is true despite the fact that regional publics provide a better return for state taxpayers than flagships, according to a study by the Upjohn Institute . That’s because students at brand-name flagships often come from out of state and leave after graduating, whereas those from regional public universities generally stay put, and the higher incomes they earn thanks to their degrees boosts the economies of their states and regions.

The near invisibility of regional public universities and their graduates extends to political campaigns. Pollsters slice and dice the electorate in all sorts of ways to get at level of education (high school, college, grad school). But you will look in vain for a political poll that has a crosstab for “regional public university graduate.” One reason for that, a political consultant explained to me, is that the category itself is not well known, so very few individuals would self-identify as belonging to it, even if asked.

That may be true. But it could also be true that campaigns are missing an opportunity because they simply don’t recognize it.

Nothing is more powerful in politics than a large group of voters who have reason to feel both proud and disrespected and who are “seen” for the first time. Think Reagan Democrats in the 1980s, unmarried women in the 2000s or “double haters” in this election cycle. They are voters who might not consciously think of themselves as a group, but have characteristics and affinities that, once identified, help political professionals see the electorate and the data in new and useful ways.

“State college voters” may be such a group. Their identity — their story — is this. They grew up without a lot of wealth, went to the most cost-effective college they could find that was near their home, worked hard — at their classes as well as the outside jobs they needed to cover tuition — and started careers within commuting distance from where they grew up. Now they are stable, contributing members or leaders of their local communities, of which they take great pride. But they see people on TV, and perhaps deal with at work, who went to “better” schools and who think they’re smarter and live in cooler places when really, they’re just snobs.

These are the voters Walz was clearly giving voice to. Whether he was consciously targeting state college voters is anyone’s guess, but he is certainly a member of that tribe.

Walz earned degrees from two regional publics: a bachelor’s from Chadron State College in Nebraska and a master’s from the Minnesota State University, Mankato, where his wife, Gwen, also got her master’s. Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, can make the same claim. She spent her undergrad years at Howard University, a selective HBCU, before earning a law degree at the University of California, Hastings College of Law — the law school equivalent of a regional public university, located in San Francisco across the Bay from where she grew up. He got his bachelor’s degree at California State University, Northridge before getting a law degree at USC. Contrast them with Vance and Trump (University of Pennsylvania, class of 1968), the only all-Ivy League GOP ticket in U.S. history.

Democrats have been told time and again that they need to do a better job of reaching out to non-college-educated voters, and that’s true. They haven’t had much luck, however, largely because they are seen as representing the rich liberal elites who the working class think sold out their interests and don’t share their values. The Harris-Walz ticket seems to be trying to change that — by campaigning in red parts of swing states and promising to open more federal jobs to people without college degrees .

But while these are smart tactics, state college voters are probably a more natural constituency for Democrats. College-educated voters in general are already trending the Democrats’ way, but as political analyst Michael Podhorzer has shown , the shift is still far from complete, with a sizable number still supporting Republicans. State school voters in particular make up a substantial subset of the coveted suburban vote that has been the key to recent Democratic victories.

To win more of them, however, Democratic candidates need to put some distance between themselves and the Ivy League set, as Walz has tried to do. They should also more explicitly target the state college vote with policy proposals, like greater federal support for regional public universities. That strategy might have the double benefit of appealing to persuadable Republican voters.

In a forthcoming online survey, Brendan Cantwell and colleagues at Michigan State University found that Republicans are just as likely as Democrats to believe that their local universities are of high quality, even though they are far more skeptical of the role higher education plays in the nation generally. If Harris and Walz do win in November, regional public universities might receive more attention from policymakers in Washington, as community colleges did when Biden, whose wife teaches at one, was vice president and president.

Still, there are plenty of college-educated voters who support Republicans, and GOP candidates would be wise to try to win over more of them. The problem is that their embrace of MAGA makes that difficult. Bashing scientific expertise and trafficking in outlandish conspiracy theories does not generally appeal to college-educated swing voters.

Not enough is known yet about the political profile and proclivities of state college voters to say with certainty how important their votes will be in November. But we shouldn’t be surprised if, years from now, experts look back and conclude that they were the key.