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College-educated white Americans now favour Ms. Clinton by about 15 percentage points, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll . Whites without college degrees favour Mr. Trump by 23 percentage points.Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images

Call it the Degree Disparity, and put aside, perhaps just for this election, the Gender Gap. This fall the great division in American presidential politics is between those with a college degree and those without one.

To a startling degree, Americans who possess a bachelor's degree are siding with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton – while those without a college degree are siding with New York businessman Donald Trump. College-educated white Americans now favour Ms. Clinton by about 15 percentage points, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll released this month. At the same time, whites without college degrees favour Mr. Trump by 23 percentage points.

This is a surprising new development. For the past six elections, whites with college degrees have sided with the Republican Party, sometimes by small margins – but four years ago, when former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts was the GOP nominee, the margin was 14 percentage points. Mr. Trump's support among whites without a college degree is generally within range of Mr. Romney and previous Republican nominees.

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This election could be the first time in decades in which college graduates favoured the Democratic candidate, according to a Pew Research Center study.

The sudden flood of college-educated voters into the Democrat camp – and the resulting Degree Disparity – is one of the more curious aspects of the American presidential campaign.

"This time around," said William Mayer, a Northeastern University specialist on American presidential politics, "it's not so much income as education that is the important element."

The Degree Disparity could persist as an important element of American politics. Today 36 per cent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 have college degrees – and they will be factors in presidential races far longer than Americans over 65, a fast-declining group for which the rate of college graduation is only at 27 per cent, according to United States Census Bureau figures.

"This gap will continue to widen in upcoming elections," said Andrew Simpson, a historian at Duquesne University. "This speaks to important changes in party alignments in the country."

In recent months, it has become clear that many of the blue-collar voters who, since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, had a comfortable home in the Democratic Party, are drifting into the Republican Party, in large measure because of Mr. Trump's vow to bring back manufacturing jobs and end trade agreements that he, and many of these workers, believe have eroded the American job base.

The appeal Mr. Trump has for Americans without a college degree is not difficult to understand, for he has mobilized the support of voters, many of them unemployed or underemployed, who might otherwise have manufacturing jobs but who have been left behind by globalization. A specific target of especially bitter resentment: the North American free-trade agreement, which includes Canada and Mexico, and is blamed for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt, particularly the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the battle between the two candidates is at its rawest and most urgent.

One study by two Harvard economists found that college graduates' wages now exceed those of high-school graduates by 77 per cent – far more than the gap in 1980, which was about 40 per cent. A separate study by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania – where Mr. Trump was educated in the undergraduate Class of 1968 – found that lifetime average compensation of college graduates exceeds that of non-graduates by about $2-million (U.S.). A college degree, the Wharton study concluded, produces a "positive and persistent" economic benefit.

"The split in this election speaks to this change in society, for it is really hard nowadays to make a good living if you didn't go to college," said Jay Cost, a prominent conservative commentator who writes for The Weekly Standard magazine, a popular publication on the right. "Trump's given voice to the grievances of those without a college degree."

At the same time, Mr. Trump's positions have little resonance with voters who have college degrees – and that group is growing. In 1940, only about 5 per cent of Americans held a college degree, but by 1976, a quarter of those aged 25 to 29 had graduated from college. Over all today, a third of Americans have a BA degree, split evenly between women (33 per cent) and men (32 per cent). Despite the prominent talk about the Gender Gap, there are indications college-educated women and college-educated men vote in tandem.

Many of the states being contested in the last few weeks of the election have large groups of college graduates, especially New Hampshire. At the same time, Ohio, which is perhaps the greatest battleground in the campaign and which provides 18 of the 270 electoral votes required for election, is dominated by those – fully 72 per cent – who are not college graduates.

Political professionals agree that the battle for the 20 electoral votes in Pennsylvania is in the Philadelphia suburbs, where there is a large cluster of college graduates. In Montgomery, one of those vital suburban counties, George H.W. Bush, the 1988 Republican presidential nominee (and eventual winner), took 60 per cent of the vote. In 2012, when Democratic President Barack Obama was seeking re-election, he took nearly 57 per cent of the vote.

The bad news for Mr. Trump: Nearly half of the residents of Montgomery County hold a college degree – and a fifth of the county's residents hold a graduate degree.

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