Republicans tend to run better among voters without a college degree than those with one, which has battered Democrats in recent presidential elections. But that same pattern could give Democrats a potentially decisive boost in next month’s midterms.

Even as President Donald Trump’s approval rating craters among Americans with a college degree, history suggests those well-educated voters are virtually certain to constitute a slightly larger share of the electorate this year than in 2024. It’s the political equivalent of what economists call the “college premium” in wages.

By itself, the typical midterm tilt toward a more educated electorate may not be large enough to swing many competitive races. But the change could provide a crucial thumb on the scale for Democrats, particularly in red-leaning Senate races and House districts where the party sees opportunities to overcome long years of futility.

College graduates have long made up a larger share of the vote in midterm than presidential elections. But the gap could be wider than usual this year, given the evidence that disapproval of Trump’s second-term performance has spread into some of his core groups — including rural and working-class White voters who lack a college degree.

Trump is now desperately trying to rally those voters. If he can mobilize enough of them, it will help Republicans survive the mounting tide of discontent — particularly in heartland states such as Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, where White people without a college degree represent a disproportionate share of the vote. But if fewer of those turn out than usual, the electorate will tilt even further toward the well-educated — and, given their alienation from Trump, that could create the conditions for big Democratic gains.

“The agonizing question from now until the election will be whether non-college-educated Republicans — particularly White non-college — hold their nose and turn out at rates for Republicans that keep the environment more at a ‘blue wave’ level, or whether they stay home and the differential causes a crossover into a ‘blue tsunami’ level,” says Bryan Bennett, a Democratic pollster and data analyst.

Even small differences in the breakdown between college and non-college voters will affect the 2026 outcome because of the now-consistent educational polarization in support for the parties.

Through the heart of the 20th century, from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, Democrats consistently ran better among Americans without a four-year degree than those with advanced education. In those years, Democrats were sometimes described as the party of people who showered after work, and Republicans as the party of those who showered before.

That alignment cracked in the 1960s, as Democratic efforts to promote civil rights for racial minorities shattered their hold on White working-class voters in both the North and the South. Over the succeeding decades, Republicans expanded their blue-collar beachheads around culturally polarizing issues such as crime, gun control, abortion, immigration and later, LGBTQ rights. No Democratic presidential nominee has carried a majority of White voters without a four-year college degree since Johnson in his 1964 landslide, according to calculations from the American National Election Study by political scientist Alan Abramowitz.

Under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, Democrats, conversely, began improving their performance among college-educated voters, who often took liberal positions on the same social issues that drew non-college voters toward the GOP.

This long-developing reconfiguration — what I’ve called the class inversion — has reached a towering peak in Trump’s polarizing presidency. Exit polls found that he won about two-thirds of White voters without a college degree in all three of his presidential campaigns, the highest share for any candidate in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984. In 2024, Trump also made significant gains among Black, Latino and Asian Americans without a four-year-degree, carrying between one-third and two-fifths of them, according to the exit polls and the Pew Validated Voters study.

Meanwhile, Trump has consistently faced more resistance from well-educated voters. About 55% of all those with college degrees voted against him in 2020 and 2024, exit polls have found. In 2018, White college graduates constituted more than their national share of the population in over four-fifths of the House seats Republicans lost during Trump’s first midterm election. Support from suburban college grads helped blunt the Democrats’ midterm losses in 2022.

In Trump’s second term, as I’ve written, his support among both White and nonwhite voters without a four-year degree has significantly eroded amid widespread discontent with inflation, his tariffs and the Iran war. That decline has been the central factor enabling Democrats to expand the map into previously Republican-leaning areas with large populations of working-class White people, including the heartland Senate races and House districts in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and elsewhere.

But resistance to Trump remains considerably greater among voters with a degree than those without one. In a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters released last week, Trump’s approval rating among college graduates was nearly 40 points net negative (29% positive to 68% negative). That was almost four times larger than his approval deficit among voters without a college degree (42% to 53%).

This divergence in attitudes toward Trump is translating into a stark educational split in preferences for the midterm elections. The NYT/Siena survey found that the share of college graduates backing Democrats for the House (59%) was 13 points higher than the share of those without degrees (46%). Last week’s University of Houston poll on the Texas Senate race found Democrat James Talarico likewise running 14 points better among voters with a degree (56%) than those without (42%).

The latest CNN poll found Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown running 15 points better among college-plus voters than those without degrees; in Iowa, CNN found Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek ran 22 points better.

Not all national and state surveys this year are finding such large educational disparities in Democratic support, but the bigger difference measured in some polls would be consistent with the results of other recent elections. Exit polls found that Democratic House candidates ran 14 to 15 points better among college than non-college voters of all races in both the 2022 and 2018 midterms.

This persistent gap suggests that even small shifts in the educational composition of the electorate can have big impacts in close races.

Strategists on both sides agree that Republicans now benefit when voters without a college degree make up a larger share of the vote, as they always do in presidential campaigns.

But generally, the college share of voters rises in elections that attract less attention and turnout from the public. “The educational differences are going to be even greater when you get into those low-turnout elections,” says Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who studies electoral participation.

As McDonald notes, that dynamic partly explains why Democrats have consistently performed so well in relatively lower-turnout special elections during both of Trump’s terms. It also shapes the composition of the voting pool during midterms.

Turnout for all groups falls between each presidential race and the midterm two years later. But it tends to fall even further for voters with less education than those with more. “The presidential election is a big deal; everybody knows that, everywhere,” says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Metro think tank. “The midterms, maybe not so much.” alysis of census data that Frey conducted for CNN quantifies how that engagement gap consistently reshapes the voting pool between presidential campaigns and the subsequent midterm.

Voters without a college degree still cast a majority of all ballots in presidential and midterm elections alike. But voters who held at least a four-year college degree represented about 4 to 5 percentage points more of the vote in 2014 than in 2012, 2018 than 2016 and 2022 than 2020, according to Frey’s analysis.

But critically, almost without exception, those data sources agree on the same trajectory as the census: The share of college-educated voters is steadily rising across each presidential election, and the share bumps up a few points more in each subsequent midterm. Similar to the census, for instance, Catalist found that the share of the presidential vote cast by college graduates increased by 7 points from 2012 to 2024. Likewise, it found that the share of the vote cast by college graduates soared by 6 points from 2020 to the succeeding 2022 midterm.

Bennett, the Democratic pollster, believes the education shift again will be substantial this year. In most polls, he says, “just as there is a partisan differential in … enthusiasm about voting in the midterms favoring Democrats, there is also (an) elevated differential between college and non-college.”Using the baseline from Catalist and Pew, Bennett expects college graduates will cast about 45% of the vote next month. Using the census as his baseline, Frey puts his estimate even higher, at nearly 48%.

As Frey’s figures (see table) show, all these changes have been felt in virtually every state with a competitive Senate race this year. Even in states such as Michigan, Ohio and Maine, where voters without a degree constitute an outsize proportion of the overall electorate, their share has been declining, particularly in midterms. In all three of those states, Frey estimates that college graduates will cast as much as 45% of votes this year, up from the mid-30s in the 2014 midterms.

These changes matter largely because more college voters remain dubious of Trump than those without degrees — despite Trump’s second-term slippage among the latter. But there’s also evidence that voters without degrees — especially White non-college voters —remain more resistant to voting for Democrats, even when they are disappointed in Trump.

In the new NYT/Siena College poll, for instance, 84% of college-educated Whites who disapproved of Trump’s performance said they intend to vote Democratic for the House; only 77% of Whites without a degree who disapproved of Trump intended to back Democrats, according to detailed results provided by the pollster.

Likewise, in the most recent CNN polling, 80% of college-educated Whites down on Trump said they would support the Democratic Senate candidates in Ohio and Iowa. But Turek was attracting just 62% of non-college Whites who disapproved in Iowa, and Brown only 72% of them in Ohio. Data provided by the Pew Research Center from its latest national survey show that minorities without a degree who disapprove of Trump are also less likely to say they’re supporting Democrats than minorities with advanced education.

Trump’s final campaign swing seems designed to energize core Republican voters, primarily those without college degrees, by stressing the cultural and racial issues that divide them from Democrats, even if they are unhappy about his economic record. Like Bennett, many strategists on both sides agree the critical variable in these last weeks will be how many of those cross-pressured blue-collar Republicans turn out and stick with their party, especially in the red-leaning states that will decide Senate control.