If you've been wondering why the Democratic Party has gone completely off the rails, look no further than their most devoted demographic: college-educated white women. These wine-sipping, Subaru-driving Karens have transformed from reliable voters into radical ideologues who are dragging the party further left than Bernie Sanders could have ever dreamed.
Let's face the facts: college-educated white women, who make up 17% of all voters, have become the Democrats' most reliable useful idiots. They've swallowed every drop of woke Kool-Aid served up by their gender studies professors and DEI consultants. Meanwhile, non-college-educated white men (18% of voters) remain firmly anchored in reality, supporting Trump and conservative values.
White non-college men, a more blue collar demographic, and white college+ women, a more upscale one, have come to exist in two polar opposite political and cultural universes: pic.twitter.com/zQDi21Ukgf
— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) March 18, 2025
“Typically, the white vote is understood as being Republican-friendly (President Donald Trump carried it by 15 points), with pronounced gender and education gaps,” explains NBC News’s Steve Kornacki. “White men sided with Trump in 2024, while white women went with Kamala Harris; white voters who don’t have college degrees strongly backed Trump, while those with at least bachelor’s degrees backed Harris.”
But there is a more useful — and revealing — way to understand the politics of white voters, something that is evident in the new NBC News poll. Call this the gap within the gap.
It represents a layering of the education gap (which has exploded during the Trump era) on top of the more established gender gap. When these are combined, a gaping chasm emerges — and two specific groups come into focus.
On one end are white men without four-year college degrees. This is a generally blue-collar demographic that is now deeply aligned with Trump and opposed to progressive politics. On the other end are white women with at least four-year college degrees. This is a more affluent demographic that has been racing leftward, particularly on cultural issues, and is squarely opposed to Trump.
According to Kornacki, “Both groups pack a formidable punch.”
He explained, “Eighteen percent of all voters last year were noncollege white men and 17% were college-educated white women. And they have come to exist in polar opposite political and cultural universes, each one unrelatable and probably unrecognizable to the other.”
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Here's the delicious irony: while these suburban warriors for social justice obsess over pronouns and microaggressions, they're actually destroying the Democratic Party's ability to build winning coalitions. They're so busy virtue signaling about their latest cause célèbre that they've completely lost touch with working-class Americans of all backgrounds.
And then Democrats wonder why they lose elections.
It’s true: When they got shellacked in the last election, they did their usual post-election introspection, and, rather than face reality, they blamed it all on sexism and racism instead of accepting the fact that pronouns and funding transition surgeries for illegal immigrants aren’t the kitchen-table issues that concern middle-class Americans. In fact, they’re nobody’s kitchen table issues, save for a tiny sliver of the most fringe elements of the left.
As Kornaki puts it, “What this all means is that white college-educated women have become not just a core Democratic constituency but also a force that has helped to propel the party to the left and magnify its emphasis on cultural issues.”
