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Question: How many US elected officials do not hold a college degree? [1]

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Date: 2024-11-09  

I have been thinking a lot about how decisively we lost non-college voters in this last election, and how we need to work on winning those folks back.

In thinking about this it occurred to me that I do not know of any representative in Congress that does not have a college degree. Perhaps I’m wrong? If anyone knows about this I would like to learn more.

Why should we care?

I believe a big part of our electoral problems arise from the fact that both parties, but especially Dems, are just not tuned in to the worldview of the most of non-college America. We don’t speak their language, we put forth ideas that we think meet their needs but they don’t resonate, and overall we are just not reaching them with our messaging. Trump is reaching them, and though his agenda is nonsense and lies, after Tuesday it’s undeniable that something about his communication and messaging is working way better than ours. We can attribute that to racism and misogyny (which do still exist), but that doesn’t offer much of a basis for persuasion and recruiting voters back to us.

I believe this is something we should be thinking hard about. I definitely think education helps people make more thoughtful decisions, but on the other hand it’s clear to me that the life experiences of college-educated and non-college-educated people have diverged dramatically. So in practically terms there is a big group of people who lack representation of people with similar life stories.

On our side, the only folks that really live and breathe the life of working class people are our union brothers and sisters. Some of them are also college educated (e.g. nurses and teachers), and others work in traditionally unionized environments like factories. However, most non-college educated people don’t work in any of those fields, and we lack access to their voices.

Hearing them and reaching them seems to me to be our most urgent order of business in the next couple years.

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