by Working class voters delivered the Republican Party to Donald J. Trump. College-educated conservatives can make sure he keeps it.
Often ignored in an increasingly blue-collar party, voters with college degrees remain at the center of the persistent Republican cold war over abortion, foreign policy and cultural issues.
These voters, who have long been more skeptical of Trump, have quietly fueled his remarkable political comeback within the party, a turn in the past year that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases. .
Although Trump dominates Republican primary polls ahead of Monday’s Iowa caucuses, just a year ago he trailed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in some polls, a deficit largely due to the former president’s weakness among college-educated voters. . . DeSantis’ advisers saw the party’s education divide as a possible starting point for overtaking Trump for the nomination.
Then came Trump’s resurgence, in which he united all corners of the party, including the white working class. But few Republican sectors have recovered as much as college-educated conservatives, a review of state and national polls over the past 14 months shows.
This phenomenon contrasts with years of wariness toward Trump by college-educated Republicans, baffled by his 2020 election lies and seemingly endless hunger for controversy.
Their move toward the former president appears to be largely a reaction to the current political climate rather than a sudden clamor to join MAGA Nation’s red-cap citizenry, according to interviews with nearly two dozen college-educated Republican voters.
Many were incredulous at what they described as excessive and unfair legal investigations against the former president. Others said they were disappointed in DeSantis and considered Trump more likely to win than former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina. Several saw Trump as a more acceptable option because they wanted to prioritize domestic issues over foreign relations and were frustrated by high interest rates.
“These are the Fox News viewers who are coming back to it,” said David Kochel, a Republican operative in Iowa with three decades of experience in campaign politics. “These voters are smart enough to see the sign that Trump is going to win, and they essentially want to end this and send him to fight Biden.”
As the presidential nominating season begins, college-educated Republicans face a profound decision. Whether they stick with Trump, return to DeSantis or line up behind Haley will help set the course of the party heading into November and for years to come.
“Now I prefer Trump”
Trump is the favorite to become his party’s nominee, which would make him the first Republican to win three consecutive presidential nominations. But a year ago there was little sense of inevitability.
He had failed to help deliver the red wave of victories he promised his supporters in the 2022 midterm elections. In the weeks that followed, he suggested ending the Constitution and faced harsh criticism for hosting a dinner with Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier, and rapper Kanye West, who had been widely denounced for making anti-Semitic comments.
The reaction of Republican voters was immediate.
In a Suffolk University/USA Today poll At the time, 61 percent of the party’s voters said they still supported Trump’s policies but wanted “a different Republican candidate for president.” An awesome 76 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed.
Trump’s ability to maintain support on both sides of the party’s education divide could be crucial to his political future beyond the Republican primaries.
In the 2020 presidential election, he lost the support of 9 percent of Republicans who voted for a different candidate, according to an AP VoteCast poll of more than 110,000 voters. Some campaign advisers have said those defections cost him a second term, especially given that Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost just 4 percent to Democrats.
College-educated voters accounted for 56 percent of Trump defections, according to a New York Times analysis of data.
Ruth Ann Cherny, 65, a retired nurse from Urbandale, Iowa, said she was returning to Trump after considering whether the party had “a younger, more dynamic guy.”
He considered Mr. DeSantis but decided he couldn’t support him because “damn, his campaign is a disaster.” He wanted to support Vivek Ramaswamy, the businessman and political newcomer, but concluded that he was too inexperienced and could not win.
“Trump has been in the White House once, and maybe this time he will have a better lay of the land and know who is who and what is what,” Cherny said.
Yolanda Gutierrez, 94, a retired real estate agent from Lakewood, California, whose state votes in the Super Tuesday primary on March 5, expressed similar sentiments.
“I know Trump has a lot of baggage,” he said. “But much of this is fiction.”
Gutierrez, who studied education in college, said he had voted for Trump twice but had leaned toward DeSantis because he liked his record as Florida governor and thought the party needed a younger leader.
“But now I prefer Trump because the Democrats are trying to find any way to imprison him,” he said.
‘Like a teenager who rebels’
The shift in Republican support for Trump can be traced almost to the time last year when, on March 30, 2023, a Manhattan grand jury indicted him for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, making him the first former president of the country. President will face criminal charges.
At the time, Trump’s primary bid had the support of less than half of voters in most polls, an ominous position he had been hanging around for months.
But just four days after the Manhattan impeachment, Trump eclipsed the 50 percent mark and has been trending upward ever since, according to a national average of polls maintained by FiveThirtyEight. As of Saturday, Trump had the support of about 60 percent of the party.
Lisa Keathly, 54, who owns two flooring companies near Dallas, said she still wanted to support DeSantis, whom she considers more polished and less crass. But she added that she was increasingly likely to back Trump in her home state’s Super Tuesday primary.
He pointed to a ruling last month by Colorado’s high court to block the former president from the primary vote, which the U.S. Supreme Court is now considering, as a moment that may have sealed his support for Trump.
“It’s a little bit like a teenager rebelling; part of me says, ‘Maybe I should vote for Trump because everyone’s telling me not to,'” Keathly said. “Part of my question is: why are they so scared?”
And he added: “Because they can’t control it.”
Concern over “a wasted vote”
Some college-educated Republicans said they had returned to Trump as they became increasingly anxious about foreign conflicts.
Unlike Haley, who now appears to be Trump’s toughest rival, they opposed sending more aid to help Ukraine against the Russian invasion. And they liked Trump’s tough talk on China.
“I like Nikki Haley and I would probably vote for her if I thought she could beat him,” said Linda Farrar, a 72-year-old Republican from Missouri, who holds her presidential caucuses on March 2. “But right now, national security is the most important thing.”
Farrar said he wanted to send a message to the world by nominating a presidential candidate who would project strength abroad.
“I’m just afraid of China and what’s happening at the border and who’s coming in,” he said. “It scares me very much. “China is really taking control – they are infiltrating from within.”
Others cited growing concern about the economy and a yearning for the kind of market gains that influenced Trump’s first three years in office.
Many, like Chip Shaw, a 46-year-old information technology specialist in Rome, Georgia, said they had been disappointed by DeSantis’ campaign and viewed support for any candidate other than Trump as “a wasted vote.”
“If we’re deviating from the way the polls are now, that’s how I feel. My vote would go away,” Shaw said. “The country was really doing well under him. “I think the economy was much better: we weren’t paying $6 per box of eggs.”
Still, support for Trump has become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The urgency among Republicans to unseat Biden has been a key factor in determining which candidate to support, a finding that Trump advisers said had been revealed in their internal research of primary voters.
Trump’s campaign has focused much of its advertising budget on attacking Biden, which appears to be an early pivot in the likely general election showdown and addresses a major concern of Republican voters.
“Trump is good,” said Hari Goyal, 73, a Sacramento doctor who supported DeSantis last year but has since changed his mind. “Look at Biden and what he has done to this country. Trump can beat him and he can fix this country.”
Ruth Igielnik and Alicia McFadden contributed reports.
