“Worship Protest” on the National Mall, Washington, DC (October 25, 2020) | Nicole Glass Photography / Shutterstock.com
For the first time in American history, a major political party has a vested interest in a low-education electorate. This astonishing fact has inspired remarkably little discussion. Religion has a lot do with it. The Republican Party courted evangelical Protestants for decades, but the client eventually captured the patron. The party was gradually narrowed by the Manichean worldview and limited intellectual horizons of evangelicals. Even Republicans with a strictly opportunistic, rather than principled, engagement with evangelicalism found themselves stuck to it like a tar baby. Dependence on evangelical votes became too great to allow for release.
How did this happen? How has it changed the political environment in which universities must operate? How, in this environment, can universities maintain their integrity as knowledge-centered institutions while advancing pluralist democracy?
So, to my first question: How did this massive historical anomaly come about, and with so little notice? The long-developing education gap between Republican and Democratic voters finally began to draw widespread attention when the results of the 2024 election showed this gap cutting across the classic lines of identity. Low-education White women and men moved decisively toward Donald Trump and other Republican candidates, and so, too, did non-White men and women. In the 2024 presidential election, nearly one-fourth of Black men and nearly one-half of Hispanic men voted for Trump, a candidate conspicuous for his failure to renounce White supremacy. Of voters who had never attended college, 62 percent went for Trump, crossing all ethnoracial and gender lines. Of voters with a degree beyond the bachelor’s, which includes the Republican-inclined people with MBA degrees, 61 percent voted for the Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris. The ethnoracial and gender identity groups long alleged to explain just about everything in American life are much less salient than educational level in explicating voter behavior in this all-important election.
But the Republican dependence on low-education voters is not new. In the campaigns of 2016 and 2020, as well as 2024, Trump made no serious effort to win states with high-education voters. He did not compete for the electoral votes of any state in the entire Northeast Corridor from Maine to Virginia with the sole exception of Pennsylvania. Nor did he try to win the Pacific states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Already by 2016, before Trump achieved control of the Republican Party, the party’s abandonment of those 16 coastal states was so far advanced that of the 32 senators representing those states, only Susan Collins of Maine and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania were Republicans. States that once produced Republican presidents and senators of real stature had come to be of little interest to a Republican Party that supposed it could control the White House and the Senate without those states. Republican leaders spentdecades working to establish an electoral foundation that could enable them to essentially write off the “coastal elites” that by 2024 Republican media had succeeded in making into a stigmatized identity group.
This Republican design centered on the notorious “Southern strategy,” the religious and educational coordinates of which remain to be appropriately confronted. Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan all understood the potential of voters uncomfortable with school integration and with federal protections of the voting rights of African Americans. Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign by extolling states’ rights while virtually standing on the graves of the Neshoba County martyrs, three civil rights activists murdered by the KKK in 1964. Shortly after his Mississippi speech, Reagan famously and cleverly told a Texas convention of the National Association of Evangelicals: “I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.” For Reagan, evangelicalism, states’ rights, and the mantra “government is the problem” all worked harmoniously.
A portentous fact, never hidden but rarely recognized to this day, is that the states with the greatest preponderance of voters Reagan was trying to reach were also states with the highest percentage of evangelical Protestants and with the lowest levels of education. Hence the Southern strategy was also, by implication, a religious strategy and an educational strategy. Many evangelical Protestants were and are college graduates, to be sure, but as late as 1970, 18 percent of the ministers serving congregations affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention had no schooling beyond high school. In 2020, 22 percent of clergy serving White evangelical congregations had not completed college, compared with 8 percent of those serving “mainline” ecumenical congregations (Chaves et al. 2025).
Decade by decade, the evangelical client’s grip on its patron became stronger. Once the party’s dependence on evangelical voters—about 80 percent of whom were voting Republican even prior to Trump’s first presidential campaign—became pronounced, the culture of those voters had to be honored, at least up to a point. Evangelicalism’sweak commitment to modern standards of epistemic plausibility became a fuzzy boundary of Republican discourse. When Franklin Graham, an evangelical leader and the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, declared that God had turned Trump’s head to avoid an assassin’s bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, during a campaign event in July 2024 (Mackey 2024), what could a self-respecting Republican senator or representative do but agree—or remain silent? Some well-educated Republican leaders simply preferred a corporate-friendly, more-authoritarian-than-not political order and had little interest in evangelical habits of thought and feeling. But for more and more of them as each election came and went, evangelicalism proved to be too powerful an instrument to go unused.
Historically, the Republican Party had long enjoyed the votes of the bulk of the upper middle class and had often given more support to public higher education than had local Democrats in many states. The leadership of New York Governors Thomas Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller in the creation and expansion of the State University of New York after World War II is an example. Another is the long list of Republican leaders over many decades who promoted the growth and independence of the University of California. But by prioritizing White Southern evangelicals and their counterparts in the Middle West and in the mountain states, the party gradually abandoned most of the states with highly educated electorates.
Evangelicalism also brought into the Republican Party a Manichean sensibility that fostered sharp polarization and made the Republicans in both houses of Congress less willing to compromise with Democrats. When the Christian supremacist Senator Josh Hawley in 2017 asserted that the “ultimate authority” of Jesus Christ had to be established in “every sphere of life,” including the government of the United States (Stewart 2021), there was nothing the least bit novel about it. Generations of preachers had encouraged the faithful to see themselves as a morally superior community, required by God to either separate themselves from a sinful society or to take it over and subject it to Christian authority. At the founding of the National Associationof Evangelicals in 1942, the fundamentalist leader Harold Ockenga delivered an apocalyptic address calling on the faithful to make war against the New Deal and a variety of secular and liberal forces in the nation (Sutton 2014, 287).
Here is a recent Manichean and classically apocalyptic utterance of Donald Trump himself, delivered in 2023 before an audience of evangelicals:
This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, … we will throw off the sick political class that hates us, we will rout the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.
In other Bible-related effusions before evangelical audiences, Trump promised to restore Christian hegemony so resoundingly that evangelicals would never have to vote again in order to advance evangelical priorities (Gold 2024). Only a Christian-supremacist understanding of what “truth” actually is could deny that Trump reverses the old Quaker slogan of speaking truth to power and speaks, instead, power to truth.
This essay was first published in Social Research: An International Quarterly, a John Hopkins University Press publication, in its Summer 2025 edition. Reprinted with permission.
