Two of the major components of the Democratic Party's current coalition are working-class voters and voters with higher education. The former group stands to benefit from Democratic economic policies, whereas the latter group has more exposure to people of different demographic groups and are thus more likely to be tolerant of them, which is another component of the Democratic party's main platform.
Neither of these assertions are true.
Democrats spent much of the Obama administration pursuing policies that were antithetical to the interests of working class voters. Some of the more glaring examples were Obama's very public overtures toward Republicans about his willingness to cut Social Security Benefits; the total lack of accountability for the financial institutions that wrecked the economy in 2008; the lackluster and inadequate stimulus bill; and the TPP.
Even the ACA was poison for many working class households. Medicaid expansion wasn't for them, after all. It was for the poor. People in the working class are more likely to find themselves saddled with a high-deductible Obamaplan that they can't afford to use and that grows more expensive with every passing year.
The distinction between being working class and being poor tends to gets lost in these discussions. Democratic economic policies, with their self-defeating embrace of means-testing, impose extraordinarily high marginal tax rates on lower-middle income households and create a sense of guilt and stigma about accepting benefits. While they are clearly better for the poor than alternatives like proposed by Republicans - which mostly come down to "private charity" and "letting natural selection take its course" - this is not so for those who are a notch or two above poverty.
Education and tolerance don't necessarily go together. People with four-year degrees are better at observing the stilted identity politics etiquette of the professional-managerial class, but they perform no better on tests of implicit bias. The most heavily segregated neighborhoods in the country are filled with white people with advanced degrees.
Moreover, no one goes to greater lengths to isolate their children from people who are
too different than parents with advanced degrees living in high-income suburbs. School segregation in 2018 isn’t driven by the anxious “hardhats” who turned out in the streets with baseball bats to oppose busing in the 1970s. Instead, it’s status-conscious upper-middle class professionals with advanced degrees – people who understand that a winner-take-all economy leaves no room for the average, who can afford to pay hundreds of thousands more for a house in the right “public” school district, and who will spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to get their child into the right preschool.
Obviously, the Democratic coalition continues to include working class voters, but they are disproportionately black, first- and second-generation immigrants, woman, and young people. But increasingly they align with Democrats less out of class solidarity than in recognition that, for one reason or another, they are openly threatened by the Republican Party's brand of right-wing savagery.
Moreover, today's working class heavily overlaps with the college-educated. Educational attainment is a much less reliable guide to class status than it was several decades ago.
