How key voters came back to Trump
College-educated return to fold
DES MOINES — Workingclass voters delivered the Republican Party to Donald Trump. College-educated conservatives may ensure that he keeps it.
Often overlooked in an increasingly blue-collar party, voters with a college degree remain at the heart of the lingering Republican cold war over abortion, foreign policy, and cultural issues.
These voters, who have long been more skeptical of Trump, have quietly powered his remarkable political recovery inside the party — a turnaround that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.
Even as Trump dominates Republican primary polls ahead of the Iowa caucuses Monday, it was only a year ago that he trailed Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida in some surveys — a deficit due largely to the former president’s weakness among college-educated voters. DeSantis’ advisers viewed the party’s educational divide as a potential launching point to overtake Trump for the nomination.
Then came Trump’s resurgence, in which he rallied every corner of the party, including the white working class. But few cross sections of Republicans rebounded as much as college-educated conservatives, a review of state and national polls during the past 14 months shows.
This phenomenon cuts against years of wariness toward Trump by college-educated Republicans, unnerved by his 2020 election lies and his seemingly endless craving for controversy.
Their surge toward the former president appears to stem largely from a reaction to the current political climate rather than a sudden clamoring to join the red-capped citizenry of MAGA nation, according to interviews with nearly two dozen college-educated Republican voters.
Many were incredulous over what they described as excessive and unfair legal investigations targeting Trump. Others said they were underwhelmed by DeSantis and viewed Trump as more likely to win than former governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina. Several saw Trump as a more palatable option because they wanted to prioritize domestic problems over foreign relations and were frustrated with high interest rates.
“These are Fox News viewers who are coming back around to him,” said David Kochel, a Republican operative in Iowa with three decades of experience in campaign politics. “These voters are smart enough to see the writing on the wall that Trump is going to win, and essentially want to get this over with and send him off to battle Biden.”
Trump is the odds-on favorite to become his party’s nominee, which would make him the first Republican to win three consecutive presidential nominations. But there was little sense of inevitability a year ago.
He had failed to help deliver the red wave of victories he promised supporters in the 2022 midterm elections. In the weeks that followed, he suggested terminating the Constitution and faced sharp criticism for hosting a dinner with Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist, and rapper Kanye West, who had been widely denounced for making antisemitic comments.
The backlash from Republican voters was immediate.
In a Suffolk University/USA Today poll at the time, 61 percent of the party’s voters said they still supported Trump’s policies but wanted “a different Republican nominee for president.” A stunning 76 percent of collegeeducated Republicans agreed.
This month, the same pollster showed Trump with support from 62 percent of Republican voters, including 60 percent of those with a college degree.