Fact-check
Has Education Overtaken Race as America's Key Ideological Divider?
Mostly True — a peer-reviewed PNAS Nexus study confirms education-based ideology gaps (0.72 SD) now exceed racial gaps (0.27 SD), but race still dominates actual voting behavior by a 1.7× wider…
By The Crosscheck Desk · 2026-07-10
Ideological differences by race have declined dramatically, while education has become an increasingly prominent ideological divider in American politics
"Ideological differences by race have declined dramatically, while education has become an increasingly prominent ideological divider."
Contents
The Study
The underlying research is Stephen Jessee's April 2026 paper in PNAS Nexus, a peer-reviewed open-access journal of the National Academy of Sciences.[2] It analyzed Cooperative Election Study (CES) surveys from each of five presidential election years, 2008 through 2024, drawing on more than 250,000 respondents total. To measure ideology, Jessee applied a two-parameter IRT (item response theory) model to 132 policy questions spanning taxes, abortion, immigration, healthcare, and environment — producing a standardized scale where 0 is the sample mean, negative values are liberal, and positive values are conservative.
The CES is a gold-standard academic dataset; the sample sizes (60,000 respondents in 2024 alone) substantially reduce sampling error, and the overlapping question set across years enables direct comparison. The methodology is in line with established political-science practice for estimating latent ideology.
What the Numbers Show
The two core trends are not subtle. On the racial side, Black Americans shifted 0.43 standard deviations rightward from 2008 to 2024 (from −0.59 to −0.16 on the standardized scale). Hispanic Americans moved roughly 0.30 SD in the same direction. As a result, the White-Black ideological gap shrank from 0.62 SD to 0.27 SD — a 57% reduction over sixteen years. Asian Americans became the most liberal racial group by 2024.[2]
On the educational side, the movement ran in both directions: Americans with a high school diploma or less shifted 0.28 SD rightward (from −0.08 to +0.20), while graduate-degree holders reached approximately −0.52 at their most liberal (2020). By 2024, the gap between the most- and least-educated groups stood at 0.72 SD.
Jessee also noted the educational trend began around 2012, before Donald Trump's first presidential campaign — a finding that pushes back against simple "Trump effect" explanations. And crucially, educational polarization occurred within each racial group, not just among White Americans.[2]
A 2026 study by Zingher in Political Research Quarterly adds granularity: within the educated, the divide between holders of bachelor's degrees and graduate-degree holders is nearly as large as the divide between BA holders and high-school graduates — meaning educational polarization is not simply a "college vs. non-college" binary but a full gradient, with graduate-degree holders at the Democratic extreme.[3]
The Better Question (Frame-Lock Check)
The PsyPost headline asks which demographic characteristic — race or education — has become the "key ideological divider." That framing risks collapsing two distinct things: where people fall on a liberal-conservative policy scale, and how people actually vote and identify with parties.
The Jessee study measures the first: average ideology positions, aggregated across 132 policy items. On that measure, the education gap now clearly exceeds the racial gap. But party identification and vote choice — what most readers mean when they hear "political divider" — tell a different story. In the 2024 presidential election, 83% of Black voters backed Kamala Harris versus 15% who backed Donald Trump: a 68-point partisan margin. No educational category comes close. The widest education gap (postgraduate 65% Harris vs. non-college 57% Trump) spans 46 points between the most polarized endpoints — sizable, but 1.7 times smaller than the racial voting margin.[5]
The sharper question is: has education overtaken race as a driver of ideological positions? Yes, clearly and by a measurable 2.7-to-1 ratio. Has education overtaken race as a driver of voting and party identity? Not yet, and arguably not close.
The Strongest Counter-Argument: Race Still Dominates Voting
There is a coherent case that the "ideological convergence" finding is somewhat misleading about race's political role. Consider what the Jessee data actually shows for Black Americans: they moved from −0.59 to −0.16 on a liberal-conservative scale — considerably more moderate, but still left of center. Yet their vote for Democrats in 2024 remained at 83%.[5] That gap between ideology and behavior — more moderate views, still overwhelmingly Democratic votes — suggests racial group solidarity and identity remain powerful organizers of political behavior independent of policy ideology.
Similarly, the Hispanic rightward shift on ideology corresponds to a 12-point swing toward Trump in 2024 vote share.[6] But this movement was heavily concentrated among non-college Hispanic men; among college-educated Hispanics, the shift was much smaller. Critics of the "education overtakes race" frame argue this looks less like education replacing race and more like economic class sorting that runs through both education and racial categories simultaneously.
A 2024 study of multidimensional polarization (PMC) found that racial group membership still shows a 0.94 cosine similarity to partisan alignment — meaning race and party are still almost perfectly co-aligned at the structural level, even as ideological positions within racial groups diversify.[7]
The adversarial-review score for this counter-argument: 3 out of 5. It does not directly refute the Jessee study's core finding on ideology positions; it establishes that race remains dominant in voting — a different dimension than policy ideology. This complication should accompany the verdict, but it doesn't overturn it.
Who Gains, Who Loses: Coalition Scorecard
The realignment has concrete stakes for each major political coalition — not just an academic measurement shift.
| Actor | Outcome | What Changed |
|---|---|---|
| Republicans | Net Gain | Non-college voters of all races have shifted rightward on ideology; Hispanic male support nearly doubled in 2024. The "working-class" realignment, long predicted, now spans racial categories. |
| Democrats | Mixed | Gained among college and especially graduate-degree holders across races. Lost margin among non-college Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The coalition is more educated, more suburban, and more racially diverse in ideology — but also smaller among historically reliable non-college minority voters. |
| Black voters | Mixed | Retained as a Democratic bloc in voting (83% Harris), but ideological positions shifted notably toward the center. Non-college Black men drove the largest movement; college-educated Black women remained the most stable Democratic constituency. |
| Hispanic voters | Contested | The most fluid group: Trump won 48% of Hispanic voters in 2024 — near parity — driven mostly by non-college Hispanic men. But Hispanic women and college-educated Hispanics remained Democratic-leaning.[6] |
| White non-college voters | Entrenched right | 63% Republican affiliation, steadily climbing over 15 years. Combined with Black and Hispanic non-college rightward movement, this group is the engine of the educational realignment the Jessee study documents. |
Pew Research's 2024 coalition analysis confirms that Democrats now draw 44% of their voters from racial and ethnic minorities, compared to 20% for Republicans — but this majority-minority Democratic coalition is itself increasingly stratified by education.[4]
What to Watch
Signals That Will Confirm or Complicate This Realignment
- November 2026 midterms: Turnout patterns among non-college minority voters will test whether 2024's Trump gains were durable or driven by Harris-specific factors. A partial rebound toward Democrats among non-college Blacks would suggest the realignment is more contingent than structural.
- CES 2026 wave (data expected mid-2027): The Cooperative Election Study will add a sixth data point to the Jessee trend lines. If the education gap continues to widen while the racial gap narrows further, the "Mostly True" verdict moves toward "True." If the trends plateau or reverse, it would qualify the finding significantly.
- Zingher's within-education gradient: As graduate-degree attainment grows (from 9% in 2000 to 14.5% today[3]), the most-educated category becomes a larger share of the electorate and a larger piece of Democratic coalition math. Watch whether the BA-vs-graduate divide continues to widen.
- Hispanic ideology vs. voting alignment: If Hispanic voters approach ideological parity with White voters but retain a modest Democratic lean in vote choice, it would confirm that race still moderates the ideology-behavior link even as ideology itself converges.
Citation Integrity Pass
Load-bearing claims were verified against fetched source text:
- White-Black gap shrank from 0.62 to 0.27 SD: Supported — Jessee (2026) abstract and Figure 1 state this directly.[2]
- Black shift of +0.43 SD (−0.59 → −0.16): Supported — stated as "approximately half a standard deviation" in the paper.[2]
- Education gap "widened to over a quarter of a sample SD": Partially supported — this is specifically the HS vs. college-degree gap; the HS vs. graduate-degree gap reaches approximately 0.72 SD, which is the figure used in this briefing for the extreme comparison. The briefing distinguishes these clearly.
- 83% Black voters backed Harris in 2024: Supported — Pew Research, June 2025.[5]
- Hispanic voters: 51% Harris, 48% Trump: Supported — Pew Research, June 2025.[5]
- Trump won 48% of Hispanic voters / 12-point increase: Supported — Pew Research (June 2025) and AS/COA (2024).[5][6]
Sources
- The political realignment of America: Education overtakes race as key ideological divider
- Americans' ideological differences have decreased by race, increased by education
- Educational Polarization in American Politics: More than Just a Diploma Divide
- Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation
- Voting Patterns in the 2024 Election
- How Latinos Voted in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election
- Charting multidimensional ideological polarization across demographic groups in the USA
