Students of American national elections have grappled with several voter gaps, i.e., substantial differences in the way categories of people vote for candidates of different parties. There has been a gulf between the ways whites and blacks voted for many decades. The New York Times, for example, reports exit polls in 2016 showing that 85% of blacks voted for Hillary Clinton, while 58% of whites backed Donald Trump. That’s a gap of 27 percentage points; smaller than in recent presidential elections, but still sizable. (There are problems with exit polls, but for now, the data they contain are all we have about who voted for whom in 2016.) Since at least the 1980s, we’ve heard about the gender gap, with women more likely to vote Democrat than men. The same exit poll indicates that Trump won men’s votes by 12 percentage points, while Clinton won women’s votes by the same figure. A 24 percentage-point gender gap may be the largest on record. Trump received more white women’s votes than Clinton, but African-American and other minority women’s votes made the difference. There have been other gaps, but these make the point.

Election 2016 may have revealed a new gap, namely the different voting patterns of non-college educated whites and their college educated counter-parts. Polls during the primaries and the general election campaign showed that Trump did especially well among non-college educated whites, while -- and this was most evident in the general election campaign -- Mrs. Clinton drew well among college-educated types.

Exit polls for 2016 show that 45% of college-educated whites voted for Clinton, and 49% backed Trump. On the other hand, 67% of non-college educated whites backed Trump, while only 28% said they backed Clinton. Even though Trump did better among college-educated whites than most polls predicted, he still won non-college educated whites’ votes by 39 percentage points. (It will be interesting to see, if the polls are broken down by age, what the age-based percentages of college-educated whites who backed the candidates in 2016 looks like. If exit polls can be believed, young people said they were more likely to vote for Clinton than were those over 50.)

A variety of explanations have been offered to account for what seems to be a new phenomenon in American electoral politics. (The diploma divide may also be occurring in Great Britain and on the European continent, but let’s focus on the phenomenon in the U.S.) Tim Alberta’s article, “The Education Gap,” in the October 24 number of National Review, summarizes many of the putative explanations for today’s diploma divide. As he notes, “[College] [d]egree holders, on average, are more liberal, more secular, more suburban, and wealthier than voters who did not attend college in this election.”

Alberta concentrates on non-college educated persons’ lagging financial conditions. Quoting pollster Steve Koczela, he notes that non-college educated individuals “have had a really tough run over the past decade, have a much bleaker perception of their economic situation,” are more hostile to the central government, and more likely to respond to Trump’s rhetoric.

Let’s look again at the first two generalizations Alberta lists about college grads: they are, on average, “more liberal” and “more secular” than their non-college educated counterparts.

Assuming these two facets of today’s college graduates are correct, could we be seeing the consequences of the Left’s dominance of higher learning in America?

Observers of academe have long noted the Left’s domination of higher education. Beginning perhaps with William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951), and especially since Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), critics of academe have documented consequences of the Left’s increased dominance. As Warren Treadgold, professor of Byzantine Studies at St. Louis University, observed in the September 19, 2016 number of the Weekly Standard, “universities’ only legitimate function is to teach and produce leftist propaganda and to prohibit criticizing it.”

If anyone still needs documentation for these assertions, read Natalie Johnson’s article, “Liberal Professors Outnumber Conservative Faculty 5 to 1. Academics Explain Why This Matters,” in the Daily Signal’s January 14, 2016 issue. If that source is too conservative for you, see Neil Gross’s book, Why Professors Are Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? (2013). (Gross is a self-described liberal sociology professor.)

Now let’s explore what the leftists’ domination of higher education has begot.

Two reports by the Pew Research Center for The People and The Press shed useful light on education’s effect on key political dispositions.

The first, titled “A Deep Dive into Party Affiliation” appeared April 7th, 2015. Based on polls taken between 1992 and 2014, the Center’s report showed a growing tendency for college graduates to identify with or lean to the Democrat Party. Forty-three percent of college grads claimed to identify with or lean to the Democrats in 1992, compared to 52% in 2014. By 2014, 57% of those with post-graduate degrees identified were some kind of Democrat, compared with only 35% who were Republicans. On the other hand, people whose education ended with high school diplomas or even before were slightly less likely to be Democrats in 2014 (47%) than they had been in 1992 (52%). Just under two-fifths (37%) of these people were Republicans in both years.

Based on a poll of 6,004 individuals between August 27th and October 4th, 2015, Pew’s second report, entitled “A Wider Ideological Gap between More and Less Educated Adults” (April 16, 2016), is also revealing. It divided education into four categories: post-graduate, baccalaureate degree, some college, and high school or less. Ideology -- measured by responses to ten questions tapping opinions about government performance, the social safety net, the environment, immigration, homosexuality, etc. -- was broken into five categories: consistently liberal, mostly liberal, mixed, mostly conservative, and consistently conservative.

There was a relationship between an individual’s level of education and her/his ideological orientation. Fifty-four percent of adults with post-graduate education held either consistently or most liberal views, while 22% espoused a mix of ideological orientations, and 24% had either mostly or consistently conservative opinions. Among those with baccalaureate degrees, 44% expressed consistent or mostly liberal opinions, 27% had mixed ideological opinions, and 29% held mostly or consistently conservative views. Thirty-six percent of people with some college held consistent or mostly liberal opinions, 36% expressed a mix of ideological opinions, and 28% had mostly or consistent conservative opinions. Finally, only 27% of adults who had not gone to college held consistent or mostly liberal opinions, 48% had mixed ideological perspectives, and 26% expressed mostly or consistent conservative views.

If these Pew Research Center reports can be credited, there is a diploma divide in the U.S. today, and it is largely a result of exposure to higher education. Treadgold’s assessment of universities’ central mission seems vindicated.