Published December 10, 2025
The 2024 election is, blessedly, in our rear-view mirror, and the big story is the confirmation of a long-running trend. Specifically, today’s political parties are divided less by race than in previous decades, and the biggest dividing line in American politics is increasingly becoming educational polarization.
Indeed, one of the biggest predictors of whether a state voted for President-elect Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris is its share of adults with a college degree. The story is fairly straightforward: Democrats have adopted the policies and patois of Americans who spend four years or more on a college campus, while working-class voters have swung to the right. In all but a handful of cases, states with an above-average share of residents with a bachelor’s or more voted blue, those at or below average voted red.
This educational polarization threatens to scramble the long-term political map in all sorts of different ways. But perhaps one underrated dynamic is that long-running trends in family formation are intersecting with this political polarization in new and unpredictable ways. Compared to just a decade ago, Republicans are drawing from a more working-class base—and those voters have been the hardest hit by the decline in marriage. So, this year’s returns offer a suggestion for how the cultural dynamics that are remaking American politics may alter the relationship between fertility and political behavior as well.
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Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where his work with the Life and Family Initiative focuses on developing a robust pro-family economic agenda and supporting families as the cornerstone of a healthy and flourishing society.