A Fox News poll released Thursday evening brought some welcome news for the GOP. The survey showed Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers leading his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, 51% to 47% — a 4-point advantage. The poll of registered voters was conducted August 6–10.
While a 4-point lead may seem underwhelming, Fox News polls, in my experience, have tended to lean in Democrats’ favor.
Rogers’ lead is not surprising. Given El-Sayed’s radical views, even some Democrats in the state oppose him. The party establishment worked mightily over the past few months to promote their preferred candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), in the primary. Despite their efforts, El-Sayed narrowly won.
The Fox poll showed Rogers leading El-Sayed by 14 points among white voters and by 11 points among men.
But El-Sayed’s staggering 23-point advantage among white college-educated women, 60% to 37%, drew the most attention.
The X account @EndWokeness posted this result with the caption, “SNL predicted this back in 2015,” accompanied by a clip from a Saturday Night Live skit. Some readers may already be familiar with it, but for those who aren’t, I highly recommend taking 44 seconds to watch it.
The 2015 skit begins like a sentimental father-daughter car commercial, with a father driving his seemingly sweet, idealistic daughter to what viewers initially assume is college. The heartwarming mood takes an abrupt turn when they arrive at their destination and it is revealed that she is actually leaving home to join ISIS.
He nods to an approaching vehicle and tells her, “It looks like your ride’s here.”
The punch line comes when an ISIS fighter reassures the emotional father that he will “take care of her.”
That makes the connection @EndWokeness is drawing pretty clear: the joke rests on the absurd juxtaposition of a wholesome, earnest young American woman and her inexplicable enthusiasm for a radical Islamist organization.
[A complete version can be viewed on YouTube.]
We know that college-educated Americans of all political stripes and genders have, to varying degrees, been exposed to the overwhelmingly progressive political culture that predominates on most college campuses. Given that north of 90% of college professors are left-leaning, how could it be otherwise?
Polls have repeatedly shown that white college-educated women have become one of the most reliably Democratic segments of the electorate. In 2024, a Pew Research poll found that 57% identified with or leaned toward Democrats, while 42% identified with or leaned toward Republicans.
And while the result from Fox isn’t necessarily an El-Sayed-specific phenomenon, according to exit polls from the 2020 election analyzed by the left-leaning Brookings Institution, it might be a Michigan-specific phenomenon: “In Michigan specifically, the movement has been visible for years: white female college graduates shifted sharply toward Democrats between 2016 and 2020.”
It makes sense that this trend would be more pronounced in Michigan than in, say, South Carolina.
[Interestingly, Fox compared this poll to its 2024 Michigan voter analysis and found that El-Sayed is actually underperforming Kamala Harris’s 2024 showing among women overall.]
But the Pew poll also found that white college-educated males have moved to the Right. White college-educated men have been exposed to the same campus culture as the women, so what would explain the dramatically different political differences between them?
First, women overall tend to identify as liberal at higher rates than men, while men are more likely to identify as conservative. We saw that in 2024.
College-educated women are especially liberal on social and cultural issues. Abortion is an obvious example, particularly since Dobbs. College-educated women also tend to be more liberal than similarly educated men on issues such as gun control, race, LGBTQ rights, and immigration.
Moreover, college-educated women are disproportionately represented in education, healthcare, nonprofits, communications, government, and other professional environments where Democratic identification tends to be stronger. College-educated men are drawn more to fields such as engineering, finance, technology, management, and business ownership, where economic and regulatory considerations likely pull them toward Republicans.
Trump himself probably magnifies the divide. Some college-educated women who might not be particularly progressive on economic questions have been strongly alienated by Trump personally and by the MAGA movement he leads. College-educated men, on average, might even be impressed by Trump’s boldness.
The broader question, then, is not why white college-educated women lean more Democratic; that trend has been evident for years.
What is more remarkable is the degree to which they appear willing to support a candidate as far to the left as El-Sayed. A 23-point advantage among this group suggests that, for many of these voters, cultural and social issues — along with antipathy toward Trump and the MAGA movement — may outweigh concerns about just how radical El-Sayed is.
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