From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrow-F. This is the Daily.

As Democrats wrestle over the direction of their party, a new crop of progressive candidates has made the case that the political future is economic populism.

Among the biggest supporters of that platform are college graduates, who used to lean right

politically, but over the last few decades have moved increasingly to the left.

Today, my colleague Noam Scheiber explains the economic forces that have left many college grads deeply indebted, underpaid, and angry, and how their unmet expectations are reshaping class politics in America.

Music It's Thursday, June 11th.

Noam, to set the stakes of the conversation that we're about to have. Can you describe the political

transformation of college graduates that you've just written a book about and that you've been

reporting on for years now? Yeah. So I think we sometimes forget that as recently as the 1980s and

1990s, college grads were actually pretty conservative politically in the 1980s and 1990s, college graphs were actually pretty conservative politically.

In the 1980s, for example, they tended to vote Republican by double-digit margins, at least on the

presidential level. They used to favor things like smaller government, lower taxes, fewer regulations.

And a lot of this, I think, was driven by the

fact that college-educated workers tended to see themselves as kind of management adjacent.

They tended to expect that their lives would become much more affluent in the future.

So this is very consistent with their worldview. If you're an affluent person and you run a business

or you're an executive, you tend to want the government to stay out of your way. But if you

fast forward a few decades, you really start to get a different picture. And if you look at the most

recent election, you see that college guys actually shift really far in the other direction. They end up

supporting Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by about a 15-point margin. And on those specific

economic issues like government and taxes and regulation, they've actually moved much further

to the left, much closer to people without a degree than they were in the 1980s.

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