Democrats have a 'smug' problem

The day after the election, an NBC News chart circulated on Instagram that highlighting exit poll data showing that, roughly, the more education you had, the more likely you were to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris over President-Elect Donald Trump. Some liberals used the occasion to look down upon the icky dummies who were too stupid to know they shouldn't vote for Trump.

Yet Trump’s victory was both definitive and diverse. He won broad swaths of the electorate, making significant gains in New York and California and winning over larger percentages of Latino voters and young voters than in 2020. He also won a majority of first-time voters.

Yes, Trump was able to capture a bigger percentage of the voters who didn’t go to college — from 54 percent in 2020 to 63 percent in 2024, according to those exit polls (which are often revised after the election). In fact, according to an analysis from the Financial Times, the 2024 election represented the first since 1960 that Democrats performed better with the richest Americans than with the poorest Americans. That said, Trump also performed slightly better than previously with voters with an associate’s degree and those with advanced degrees.

Of course, thinking that Trump supporters are uneducated is not really based on any core set of principled ideals — or a deep dive analysis into the actual demographic shifts. It’s a perception problem, rather than one based in reality.

Large factions of the left condescendingly believe that dumb people are the reason Trump won in 2016, and won again in 2024. And that patronizing, visceral vibe is obvious — it’s a massive turn-off to many other voters. It is a mountain smug Democrats have to overcome if they want to reconnect with voters.

The messaging from prominent members of the left in elite media positions shows they’re still in the denial and anger phases of grief. “The View” has been home to a cacophony of snobby moments over the past year, but none more than co-host Sunny Hostin’s instant assessment about why her preferred candidate lost. She called out the “uneducated white women” who voted for Trump (and threw in Latino men too) on the morning after the election.

“So why do you think that uneducated white women voted against their reproductive health freedoms?” she asked, and followed with, “And why do you think Latino men voted in favor of someone that’s going to deport” members of their communities?

Apparently describing someone who didn’t go to college as “uneducated” is just fine at ABC.

Meanwhile, the sea of smug flowed over to MSNBC on Friday night, where Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. castigated host Stephanie Ruhle, herself an “educated” white woman, over Ruhle’s claim that a lot of people voted for Trump over the cost of everyday goods.

“I do not believe that. I cannot believe that,” Glaude told her. “And the reason I think you believe that is because you don’t want to believe that’s what’s really motivating them. It’s always the case. People don’t want to believe what the country actually is, because if they believe it they’re going to have to confront what’s in them.” (For good measure, Glaude posted on X on Monday, “Trumpism IS identity politics.”)

Glaude perfectly encapsulates the problem. Here is a professor at a prestigious university who has convinced himself of the correctness of his own belief system, refusing to even consider an alternative when presented with facts and analysis. It must be racism, he insists.

Academia was once a field that welcomed curiosity, a place to interrogate one’s own point of view. Debate was welcomed. But the anti-speech activism that has arisen since the first Trump victory shows that the credentialed class wants less discussion, less nuance and more adherence to consensus.

The over-education of these expendable elites has left them bitter and resentful. Their own fecklessness in convincing those they disdain of Trump’s unique evil make them unable to be introspective. Their lack of humility will be their downfall.

But the evidence is overwhelming. Politico did an excellent deep dive on why Democrats lost a large chunk of Latino voters, and it centers on the fact that more than 80 percent of Latinos are in the working class — and economic concerns rightfully trump everything for many of them. The leftist magazine In These Times delivered a brutal, precise takedown of the state of the Democratic Party, detailing exactly how the Biden administration and the current condescending attitude on the left “abandoned the working class.”

This won’t show up in exit polls, but anecdotally I’ve found that the more degrees someone has, the more annoying he or she is likely to be — and that annoyance factor alone will make it hard to convince working-class people to support the side of the snooty jerks.

Once, the coastal liberal establishment had an air of open-mindedness. But now these elites have evolved into the provincial, narrow-minded scolds they once critiqued. All their education has narrowed their worldview. Their credentialism has built themselves a bubble with which to hide from reality.

If the Democratic Party allows its disdain for those who turned to Trump over Harris in 2024 to cloud their focus on the root issues that alienated previously left-aligned voters, they’ll be in for a rude awakening in 2028 and beyond.

Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.