Westneat: What really divides us

These top-line results aren’t what stands out, though. The poll, like a few before it had hinted, highlights how Washington is fracturing more than ever along an educational fault line. Remember Trump’s “I love the poorly educated” gaffe? Well, it came true. This poll found that education, or relative lack of it, has become the best predictor of your vote — as strong, if not more so, than where you live or how much money you make.

Trump leads in the poll among the roughly 55 percent of the state that lacks a college degree, by about 5 points. But Biden is ahead among the college grads and those with advanced degrees by a blistering 37 points, 66 percent to 29 percent. That’s an enormous diploma divide.

This is a Republican poll, remember, and yet it shows, buried in the cross tabs, that only 14 percent of college grads in this state identify with the GOP.

Political scientist Ruy Teixeira says this diploma divide is the main force fundamentally resorting the political parties. Democrats are shedding noncollege voters in droves — he says because the party has become too “woke” and politically correct. It’s morphing into the house of the educational elite.

That shift accelerated this summer. The economy was the biggest issue until the U.S. Supreme Court began bulldozing the modern cultural landscape. “(College grad) voters are less sensitive to economic problems and more likely to be moved by a social issue like abortion rights,” Teixeira writes — or by science-based concerns like pandemics or climate change. “In short, they are the perfect voters for Democrats in the current environment.”

It’s electoral gold for Democrats in a state like ours, though not so much for winning the national Electoral College.

This sorting cuts both ways. An academic “we know best” sense often breezes from Democratic politicians, which may be pushing some working-class voters into the arms of Republicans. This is new because the GOP was for decades the party of white people, big business and the rich. Call it the Trump realignment.

You can hear this shift in the language of front-line MAGA candidates, like Southwest Washington’s Joe Kent:

“The current green agenda is a stalking horse to make America weak. All these renewable sources that we’re talking about, it’s a payday for the Chinese Communist Party, electrical vehicles,” Kent said recently at a debate.

You can also hear it coming back the other way from Democratic politicians.

“There isn’t a single Republican in my state who has lifted a finger on climate change,” said Gov. Jay Inslee, in a interview last week in The New York Times titled “Gov. Jay Inslee Is Taking a Well-Earned Climate Victory Lap.” “And until the Republican Party starts to develop a positive effort, the only solution is for them to stay out of public life — to remain in private life, where they can’t do any harm.”

All of this is light years away from Barack Obama’s vision of a “purple state” America. Of course Obama undermined that with his professorial comments about how the embittered working class “clings to guns and religion.” Then came Trump, who made that a badge of honor. The setup is almost perfectly crafted for more polarization: We are now the Know-Nothings versus the We-Know-Better-Than-Yous.

Your reaction to all this? It probably depends on whether you, yourself, are out there right now clinging to your electric vehicle and your college degree.