Will college-educated suburban whites ever return to the GOP?

[Vosem]

The word "suburban" is doing a lot of work there and is poorly defined, but...uh...I don't think the Trump-era GOP lost among college-educated suburban whites? (I mean, certainly it did relative to Romney, but overall). Edison Research's exit poll has white voters with a college degree breaking for Trump over Hillary 49/45 and then for Biden over Trump 51/48. Once you consider how strongly Democratic white urban college-educated voters are, you're left with the conclusion that suburban white college-educated voters basically have to be strongly Republican, or the math doesn't add up. The reason that many of these suburban communities are no longer voting Republican is that they are no longer as white, or that they are urbanizing because of general economic growth.

But there is a long-term Democratic trend among this demographic (but, even if you add in the urban voters, Biden won white college-educated voters by less than he won Americans). Given general international education polarization trends, I think it's likely to persist, but also given downballot results in 2020 (where Republicans other than Trump tended to run ahead of him in areas with many white college-educated voters; no doubt that the 2020 House GOP won white college-educated voters) it's easy to imagine a dead-cat bounce in 2022/2024 now that Trump is no longer on the ballot. Longer than that depends on what issues come to the fore and the style that Republican nominees adopt.