President Trump is Driving Educated Voters Out of the GOP

There is always a lot of interesting information to be found in the exit polls following an election. You can compare actual voting habits with polling data and often spot trends that will be important in planning for the next election. Maybe the most important trend from last week's election is the growing partisan divide among those with a college education. In 2000, those with a college education favored Republicans by about 10 percent, roughly 55 to 45 percent. However, in the 2018 midterms, college educated voters favored Democrats by a wide margin, 59 to 39 percent. Statistically, that is a enormous change and it helps to explain why Democratic candidates were so successful in the suburbs last Tuesday.

Newsweek: "The Democratic Party now controls 90 percent of the 30 House districts with the highest proportions of college-educated people. Going into the midterm elections, Democrats only held two-thirds of these seats."

Republicans still hold the advantage with whites without a college education, and President Trump focused his message on those voters prior to last week's election.

CNBC: "Republicans retained their House seats in blue-collar and rural districts where President Donald Trump's aggressive talk on immigration played well. But Democrats wrested control of seats from the GOP in suburban districts where college-educated voters rejected Trump's warnings of a migrant "invasion."

As his base continues to shrink as a percentage of American voters, it's unlikely that warnings about immigrant "caravans" will be enough For President Trump in 2020.