The Young Economic Populists Reshaping the Left

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Natalie Kitroeff** (0:26)
From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily. As Democrats wrestle over the direction of their party, a new crop of progressive candidates has made the case that the political future is economic populism. Among the biggest supporters of that platform are college graduates, who used to lean right politically, but over the last few decades have moved increasingly to the left. Today, my colleague Noam Scheiber explains the economic forces that have left many college grads deeply indebted underpaid and angry and how their unmet expectations are reshaping class politics in America.
It's Thursday, June 11th. Noam, to set the stakes of the conversation that we're about to have, can you describe the political transformation of college graduates that you've just written a book about and that you've been reporting on for years now?

**Noam Scheiber** (1:44)
Yeah, so I think we sometimes forget that as recently as the 1980s and 1990s, college grads were actually pretty conservative politically. In the 1980s, for example, they tended to vote Republican by double-digit margins, at least on the presidential level. They used to favor things like smaller government, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a lot of this I think was driven by the fact that college-educated workers tended to see themselves as management adjacent. They tended to expect that their lives would become much more affluent in the future. So this is very consistent with their worldview. If you're an affluent person and you run a business or you're an executive, you tend to want the government to stay out of your way.
But if you fast forward a few decades, you really start to get a different picture. And if you look at the most recent election, you see that college guys actually shift really far in the other direction. They end up supporting Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by about a 15-point margin.
And on the specific economic issues like government and taxes and regulation, they've actually moved much further to the left, much closer to people without a degree than they were in the 1980s.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (3:00)
And so what explains that? What is driving that transformation?

**Noam Scheiber** (3:05)
Well, there are a number of factors that people point to when trying to explain this. But in my book, I focus first and foremost on economics.
A lot of people who went to college were really sold on this idea that it would be the key to an upper middle class adulthood. And it turned out that the reality fell far, far short of that. And instead, they were squeezed in a whole variety of ways. And that fueled a sense of grievance and frustration among a lot of college grads with the economic system that exists today.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (3:38)
Okay. What are the economic forces that led to this deep sense of frustration?

**Noam Scheiber** (3:44)
So, this starts several decades ago. In 1970, only about 10% of Americans had four-year college degrees. The vast majority of Americans did not go to college, did not have a degree. But we see that in the 80s and 90s, the number of people going to college really starts to explode.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:02)
NBC News in Depth tonight, America's new insecurity.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:06)
Good jobs, good wages, a whole way of life, disappearing forever.

**Noam Scheiber** (4:11)
And I think a lot of it has to do with the decline of traditional blue collar jobs.

**SPEAKER_6** (4:16)
In the first six months of this year alone, America lost 221,000 jobs in manufacturing, and it's getting worse.

**Noam Scheiber** (4:24)
There was a sense that automation and globalization and the decline of unions was really making it harder for people to make a living. If they only had a high school degree.

**SPEAKER_7** (4:34)
Earlier this year, the Census Bureau reinforced the view that a college degree makes a big difference in lifetime earnings, hundreds of thousands of dollars difference.

**Noam Scheiber** (4:41)
And the solution in a lot of cases was, well, we should send them to college.

**SPEAKER_8** (4:46)
I have something to say to every family listening to us tonight. Your children can go on to college.

**Noam Scheiber** (4:52)
This really becomes a kind of national obsession.

**SPEAKER_8** (4:56)
We can make college as universal in the 21st century as high school is today.