The Republican Party’s lingering class divide was on full display Tuesday as the results from the Super Tuesday primary states trickled in and former President Donald Trump easily won state after state.
The most interesting story of the results is not that Trump won but rather where he did poorly and where Nikki Haley, his last remaining rival, showed a modicum of strength, and it happened to be in the more liberal regions of each state.
The most visible sign of the former U.N. ambassador’s support was in Vermont, where she maintained a razor-thin lead over Trump, thanks to a strong performance in the cities of Burlington and Montpelier, the state’s two biggest population centers, and among the most liberal regions of the country. The two cities also happen to have a high education rate.
Such was the common theme of the few areas where Haley found support: liberal enclaves dominated by white voters with college degrees, often around major population centers. After her weekend victory in Washington, D.C., Haley turned in strong performances in the city’s Virginia suburbs of Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax.
There is no question Trump is going to be the nominee. But Haley’s pockets of support have laid bare a lingering class divide within the Republican Party, one that pits the party’s new working-class base against the old, more educated, “country club” Republicans that dominated the party in prior decades.
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As the party has adopted more blue-collar working-class voters without college degrees, it has hemorrhaged these more educated voters, which is why suburban voters have abandoned Republicans in recent elections.
This class divide is the only thing standing between Trump and an electoral landslide in the general election, even as he holds a consistent lead over President Joe Biden in most polls. If Trump were somehow able to bridge this class divide, there is no doubt he would completely shatter the Democratic coalition and easily win a second term.