the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

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BREAKING: Delta Air Lines is pausing its special congressional desk service for members of Congress until the Homeland Security shutdown is over, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
 
From the Emily Litteta Never Mind Files...

Mamdani Is Quietly Backing Away From a Threat to Raise Property Taxes​

The mayor has left lawmakers with the belief he does not plan to pursue an unpopular property tax increase, as he looks to close a budget gap of $5.4 billion over two years.

When Mayor Zohran Mamdani threatened last month to raise property taxes on New Yorkers, it was seen as a tactic to pressure Gov. Kathy Hochul into increasing income taxes on the wealthy.

Instead, it provoked immediate backlash.

Numerous elected officials — from Mr. Mamdani’s left-leaning allies to centrist Democrats representing Black homeowners — said in no uncertain terms that raising property taxes was a nonstarter.

The mayor began to quietly retreat. He convened city and state lawmakers in a series of private meetings to hear their concerns and let them know he was highly unlikely to pursue the tax increase as he was pushing for more state revenue, according to interviews with nine lawmakers.

Now, five weeks after he proposed increasing property taxes by 9.5 percent, the mayor seems to have all but given up on the idea, even as Ms. Hochul shows no interest in raising income taxes on the rich — a priority for Mr. Mamdani’s democratic socialist base.

By trying to use the proposed property tax increase as leverage with the governor, Mr. Mamdani appeared to have overestimated his power and underestimated the severe antipathy New Yorkers have toward a property tax system that often disproportionately affects middle-class homeowners.

His strategy also illustrated the risks of trying to pressure a governor whom he’d already endorsed for re-election without building public support for his tax plan.

Mr. Mamdani portrayed his announcement last month as a binary: Either Albany would raise taxes on those making $1 million or more a year and funnel more state revenue to the city, or property taxes would go up and the city would have to raid its budget reserves.

The mayor’s framing of the choice greatly angered Ms. Hochul, who thought Mr. Mamdani’s presentation amounted to grandstanding, according to three people familiar with her thinking. The mayor, who has refrained from appearing at rallies with allies to push higher taxes, had agreed not to escalate his rhetoric on demanding tax increases, two of the people familiar with the matter said.

The episode was a rare sign of tension between Ms. Hochul and Mr. Mamdani, who have forged a close partnership since he took office. Their multibillion-dollar announcement on child care exemplified some of their shared priorities, and Ms. Hochul said earlier this month that she is “working very hard to have a constructive relationship with the mayor.”

But she added that city officials needed to be doing more to rein in spending, especially after the governor had just agreed to give the city $1.5 billion in aid for a host of municipal services.

“One and a half billion is not something that is handed out every day,” she said. “I did that because I wanted to help them get a foundation to build from as they look for savings, which I think are necessary. So this is for them to work out now.”

From the outset, Mr. Mamdani had presented the property tax hike as a last resort, should he be left with a deficit after state leaders conclude their budget process. The state budget is due on April 1 but frequently is resolved after that deadline. Should that deficit persist, he would most likely still have time to try to build support for hiking property taxes — the only tax unilaterally under a mayor’s control — before his next budget presentation is due on May 1.

“I don’t think he wants to raise property taxes,” said Leroy Comrie, a state senator from Queens who attended a task force meeting where Black politicians voiced their frustration over the proposal. “He knows that it will hurt minority communities the most.”

James Sanders Jr., a state senator from Queens, said the mayor’s proposal “caused an earthquake in the Black population, which was just starting to get to know him” and raised the “question of whether the administration is fully getting it.”

Now, as state budget negotiations enter their final, frenzied stretch, Mr. Mamdani and his team are instead pushing other increases to corporate and unincorporated business taxes and to the personal income tax rate in New York City, as first reported by the news site New York Focus.

Increasing property taxes is so unpopular that a New York mayor has not done it substantially since Michael R. Bloomberg raised them by 18.5 percent to account for economic fallout from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Liz Krueger, the longtime Senate Finance Committee chair representing the Upper East Side, said that New York City was truly in “crisis” then, suggesting that the city under Mr. Mamdani was in nowhere near as dire shape.

“People in executive positions frequently float test balloons,” she said. “I think that this test balloon showed that it wasn’t a very feasible proposal.”

Carl Heastie, the Assembly speaker who represents a homeowner-heavy section of the Bronx, agreed.

“Property, a lot of the time, is the biggest asset that people will have in their lives,” he said. “I just think you don’t want to mess with that.”

When Mr. Mamdani unveiled his $127 billion budget proposal last month, he blamed the budget crunch on his predecessor, Eric Adams, and said it made it harder for him to try to fund his sweeping campaign agenda that included faster bus service and greatly expanded child care services.

He said the proposed property tax increase would raise $14.8 billion in revenue over four years, even as he insisted he didn’t want to have to enact the measure.

Several people involved in the city’s budget negotiations who were granted anonymity said City Hall officials were taken aback by the level of opposition to the proposal. One of Mr. Mamdani’s former colleagues in the State Legislature told the mayor that if he went through with the property tax proposal, he would be a one-term mayor.

In one of two meetings late last month with City Council members, Mr. Mamdani and a few of his aides gathered in a private room in City Hall with the Council’s Progressive Caucus, a group of lawmakers ideologically aligned with the mayor.

According to someone who attended, the legislators made clear their opposition to his property tax proposal, which the entire City Council would need to approve in order for it to take effect. The mayor indicated he was confident about getting more state aid to close a projected budget deficit of $5.4 billion over two years, the person said.

“I can confirm the administration has never asked us to support this,” Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, a co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, said of the proposed property tax increase.

After the mayor addressed members of the state’s Black Legislative Task Force a few weeks ago, some attendees came away convinced that he was using the warning of a tax increase purely as a bargaining chip.

Chantel Jackson, an assemblywoman from the Bronx who chairs the Black Legislative Task Force, said his property tax move “definitely caused a ruckus that I don’t think he was prepared for or that his team was prepared for.”

For now, the mayor is considering other options to close his budget gap, including drawing down the city’s cash reserves, which the city comptroller, Mark Levine, and other financial ratings agencies have warned against.

At the same time, he has proposed championing a reform to the state’s property tax system, which has long been the subject of scorn and legal action from critics who have derided it as being wildly inequitable and placing an unfair burden on lower-income New Yorkers.

In the complex system, which breaks real estate into four tax classes, some properties pay much less than their market value would dictate while others pay too much.

When asked about the proposed property tax hike, the mayor’s spokeswoman, Olivia Lapeyrolerie, said it is too early to draw conclusions, noting that the city budget typically comes together in June. The deadline for enacting a budget is June 30.

“March comes before June, and the mayor is focused on working with our partners in Albany to close the city’s inherited budget gap,” Ms. Lapeyrolerie said. “As happens annually, the mayor will then negotiate a budget with the City Council, based on what emerges from the state budget.”

If the mayor does intend to push a property tax increase, getting City Council support will not be easy.

Among the early, vocal detractors of the idea was City Council Speaker Julie Menin, whose support Mr. Mamdani needs to pass his budget. Ms. Menin also declined to join the call for an income tax hike or lay out agency cuts.

“Speaker Menin was clear from the outset that raising property taxes isn’t an option,” Council spokesman Yoav Gonen said. “Doing so would exacerbate the affordability crisis for renters, small businesses, homeowners and communities across the city.”
 
Shades of a Big Bang Theory episode. Oh the Humanity!!!

An Invisible Bottleneck: A Helium Shortage Threatens the Chip Industry​

With a third of the global supply offline because of the war in Iran, gas companies are scrambling to assure critical A.I. chip makers there will be no disruptions.

A month into the war in the Middle East, an unlikely shortage of an irreplaceable gas is looming over the global economy.

Helium is a gas that is odorless, colorless and lighter than air. It is also indispensable to manufacturing the computer chips that power artificial intelligence, an important driver of U.S. markets and economic growth.

A byproduct of natural gas processing, helium is produced mainly in the United States and Qatar. When output in Qatar was halted this month, it cut off roughly a third of the global supply. The outlook worsened last week after Iran struck Qatar’s largest liquefied natural gas facility, damaging helium production lines that could take years to rebuild.

Without helium, leading chip makers, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, could struggle to keep production lines running, with cascading effects for semiconductor-powered devices from Apple’s iPhones to Nvidia’s A.I. servers.

Helium may be best known for keeping balloons afloat, but its industrial uses are far more consequential. As the coldest liquid on earth, it cools superconducting magnets in M.R.I. machines. A shortage could ripple far beyond chip making, affecting everything from scientific research to space travel.

Semiconductor companies rely on helium at multiple stages of chip manufacturing. As intricate machines etch tiny circuits onto thin wafers of silicon, helium cools them from below to maintain the right temperature. After the wafers are washed with chemicals, helium is used to flush out toxic residue.

Analysts said it could take weeks or months for the semiconductor industry to feel the shortage, with chip companies relying on stored helium and what was already en route to Asia when the war in the Middle East began.

But the question is whether existing supplies can bridge the gap while the entire global helium trade is reorganized to avoid the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that has been effectively closed to tankers since the U.S.-Israeli military campaign began last month.

About 200 specialized containers used to transport helium were stranded in the strait at the outset of the war, said Phil Kornbluth, a former gas industry executive and helium industry consultant. It could take months to reposition them, refill them and deliver the gas to customers.

With both logistics disrupted and production facilities damaged, analysts say it is only a matter of time until the helium shortage reaches the semiconductor industry.

“There is a tsunami coming, but it’s still a thousand miles offshore,” Mr. Kornbluth said. “Right now, it’s still sunny on the beach.”

TSMC said it was monitoring the situation closely and did not anticipate any significant impact at this time. Samsung and SK Hynix declined to comment.

As chip makers race to meet the insatiable demand for artificial intelligence, their ability to do so will depend in part on whether gas suppliers can secure enough helium.

On Wednesday, in Taichung, a city on Taiwan’s west coast, France’s Air Liquide opened a factory near one of the country’s few ports equipped to handle and store liquefied natural gas and helium. Until a few weeks ago, about a third of Taiwan’s natural gas and most of its helium came from Qatar.

Air Liquide, which supplies industrial gases to most major chip makers, was assessing customers’ stockpiles and working to ensure supply, while diversifying its helium sources, according to Armelle Levieux, a vice president at the company.

But replacing lost supply is not as simple as buying more helium from the United States and stockpiling it at factories.

Like liquefied natural gas, helium needs to be transported in a special container that can keep it in liquid form. For helium, that means storage near absolute zero or about the temperature of outer space. At such temperatures, helium must be transported as a hazardous material, and only certain trucks and ships can carry it.

The containers are insulated with liquid nitrogen, which absorbs heat during the journey. But only for so long. Once the nitrogen is depleted, the helium warms, expands rapidly into a gas and becomes dangerous to store.

Chip makers “can only keep about a month and a half supply sitting around; otherwise, it starts heating up,” said Richard Brook, a former executive at Air Liquide and the chief executive of Garrison Ventures, a helium industry consultancy.

As gas companies scramble to tap alternative sources and secure additional containers in the region, chip makers should have enough helium for several months, said Arisa Liu, a director at Taiwan Institute of Economic Research, a think tank.

Chip makers in South Korea are especially exposed. About two-thirds of the country’s helium imports came from Qatar last year, according to Fitch Ratings. It relies heavily on the Middle East for more than a dozen types of chip-making materials and equipment, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.

South Korea’s semiconductor companies, which produce the memory chips crucial to A.I., are already struggling to make enough to keep up with booming global demand. Prices have already been driven higher.

When helium is scarce, it goes to whoever can pay the most. In past shortages, chip makers, with their deep pockets, have outbid the competition, leaving other sectors dependent on helium like pharmaceuticals and medical imaging short of supply.

“The semiconductor industry will pay whatever they need to pay to get that helium,” Mr. Brook said. Since the cost of shutting down a chip factory would be enormous, “they’ll outbid anybody,” he said.
 

Stench of 20 Tons of Spilled Tofu Hits Missouri Town ‘Like a Brick Wall’​

A truck careened into a ravine in Jerome, Mo., leaving the tofu to stew for weeks. “It was worse than a landfill on a hot July day,” said the general manager of a towing company.

What happens when you leave 40,000 pounds of extra firm tofu outside for three weeks? One Missouri town recently found out. And it wasn’t pretty.

The tofu imbroglio began on March 1, when a tractor-trailer hauling that staple of stir-fry dishes barreled off a highway at about 75 miles an hour, and plunged into a ravine.

The driver was unharmed, according to Brandon Williams, the chief of the Doolittle Rural Fire Protection District, which responded to the crash off Interstate 44 in Jerome, Mo., a small town about 120 miles southwest of St. Louis.

But the truck was wrecked — and the tofu was worse for the wear. Some of it was lodged inside the trailer. Some had spilled out in boxes.

The tofu and the truck languished in the ravine for three weeks while the private towing companies that had been hired to clean up the mess tried to confirm that the trucking company had enough insurance to pay for the job.

As a result, 20 tons of tofu “sat out there in the heat and cold for three weeks, just stewing,” Chief Williams said, adding that when drivers had to slow down at the highway exit near the crash site, the smell “hit you like a brick wall.”

“It was like a dead animal, but worse,” he said. “It’s probably one of the worst smells I’ve smelled in my life, and I’ve smelled some nasty stuff.”

Donald Neal, the general manager of D&D Towing & Repair in Rolla, Mo., which has been helping to haul away the tofu, said it was a labor-intensive job because flash floods had pushed some tofu into a creek. Some washed onto land more than a mile from the crash scene. It all has to be cleaned up by hand, he said.

“It was worse than a landfill on a hot July day,” Mr. Neal said. “It was rancid, for sure. I dealt with it. There were some wearing masks.”

He said crews initially used a drone to map out how far downstream the tofu had been carried.

Some tofu was still in the creek on Thursday, and workers have had to “wade through water that’s four or five feet deep in places” to remove it, Mr. Neal said, adding: “We have to eventually have an amphibious vehicle out there.”

The Doolittle Rural Fire Protection District has referred to the mess on its Facebook page as “the infamous Jerome Tofu Monster” and the cleanup as “the Great Battle of Jerome.”

Dan Wojcikowski, an owner of Big Boy’s Towing and Recovery, based in Eureka, Mo., who has been helping to oversee the cleanup, said it had required $3 million worth of equipment, including a skid steer, two excavators, a dump truck and four dumpsters.

The truck driver, who had been in another crash in Rolla, Mo., 20 minutes before he crashed in Jerome, received two citations for failing to drive on the right half of the roadway, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. The trucking company did not respond to messages.

The tofu accident was not the first food-related truck crash in the area. Last August, Chief Williams said, a truck carrying 40,000 pounds of rib-eye steaks went up in flames on Interstate 44.

On Tuesday, crews siphoned the gas out of the truck in Jerome, and pulled it out of the ravine using a crane. They dumped the tofu that was still in the trailer in a landfill. Mr. Wojcikowski said it was unclear how much the cleanup might cost because it might take a week to finish the job.

“At this point, we’re just trying to get the creek, and all the stuff that’s in the creek,” he said. “It’s going to take time. It’s all footwork.”

Although some previous truck crashes have spilled Alfredo sauce, wine and tomatoes, this one did not pique Mr. Neal’s appetite. He said he doesn’t even like tofu, and isn’t eager to try it now.

“I'm a red-meat eater,” he said.
 
Interesting read. Way back when in my day, people graduating with BA's in Art History were the brunt of "Talk about a worthless degree" jokes. Looks like the Joke Pool has rightfully grown exponentially, and any college graduate can be the brunt of many jokes...

Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed​

Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.

Political observers on the left and right had very different views on whether Zohran Mamdani would be a good mayor of New York City. But one thing they agreed on was why so many young college graduates supported the self-proclaimed democratic socialist.

As Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Trump backer, put it in an interview with The Free Press after last fall’s election: Too many people graduate from college with useless degrees, sky-high debt and long odds of owning a home. The graduates saw Mamdani as a solution to these problems. “If you proletarianize the young people,” Mr. Thiel said, “you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”

He’s not wrong, at least about the economic challenges facing recent college graduates. Student debt has escalated over the past few decades, while housing is increasingly inaccessible for young Americans, especially in high-priced areas like New York and San Francisco.

Perhaps most alarmingly, recent college graduates are having a harder time finding work. Between 1990 and 2018, it was almost unheard-of for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. But that has been the case for five straight years now.

It appears that the white-collar job market will continue to soften this year. And almost all of these problems precede the impact of artificial intelligence, which is still in the early stages of cannibalizing human labor.

As a result, poll after poll shows that college graduates are unusually dour. In surveys by the University of Michigan dating back to the 1960s, the college educated had never been more downbeat about economic conditions than over the past four years. Gallup recently found that the portion of college graduates who thought it was a good time to find a “quality job” was a mere 19 percent, down from over 70 percent in 2022.

Of course, the economic turmoil of the last decade or two has taken a toll on millions of Americans. Most of them lacked degrees, and many fared even worse financially than the college educated.

But for young college graduates, extended bouts of unemployment, or long periods stuck in a low-paying job that didn’t make use of their degrees, upended the entire picture of adulthood they had been taught to expect. In effect, a gap has opened up between the life that many graduates believed they had been promised and their actual prospects. And they’re seething about it.

The College Admissions Arms Race​

For people in their 20s and early 30s, those expectations were forged as early as elementary school, when “college for all” became a national obsession — the way every American could achieve middle-class affluence.

One of the country’s largest charter school networks, KIPP, helped popularize the mantra “College starts in kindergarten” after it was founded in 1994, not long before this cohort was in fact entering kindergarten.

Presidents reminded families that “the return on a college investment” was nearly double that of the stock market (Bill Clinton) and that college was no longer a luxury but an “economic imperative” (Barack Obama).

With an eye toward future college enrollment, students slogged through longer school days and labored over more homework. One scholar found that the average amount of time that younger children in elementary school spent studying at home increased roughly threefold between 1981 and 2003.

In high school, when it was time for actual college prep, as opposed to just the preparation for the prep, they stuffed their résumés full of university-level classes. The number of students taking Advanced Placement courses grew tenfold from the 1980s to the early 2010s, as the author Malcolm Harris has noted. At Edina High School, in an upper-middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, the now-34-year-old Teddy Hoffman took more than half a dozen A.P. classes before being admitted to Grinnell College in Iowa. It was a fairly common course load for someone who aspired to attend a competitive college.

And it wasn’t just affluent white students who became foot soldiers in the college admissions arms race. At the Baltimore County high school that Chaya Barrett, now 32, attended, students were tracked into classes where they studied vocabulary words and took practice SATs so that no manner of test question would faze them.

“It was: ‘We want you to get to college,’” said Ms. Barrett, who later graduated from Towson University in Maryland. “‘We’re a mostly Black school. And we have high college acceptance rates, and we want to keep that up.’”

In this relentless race to the college quad, money was no object. Dylan Burton, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, already had a lot of college credit when they enrolled in the video game design program at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2017. It would still cost them nearly $70,000 over two and a half years to earn their bachelor’s degree, after room and board. But they had wanted to make video games since childhood, and the industry was exploding in popularity and revenue.

So millions of people like Mr. Hoffman and Ms. Barrett and Mx. Burton applied for scholarships and part-time jobs, and took out loans to cover the difference. Mx. Burton borrowed the full amount. For several years these students juggled finals and term papers and the night shift at the dining hall or the weekend shift at the mall.

And then, once they graduated, many found themselves with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and no path to a job in line with their credentials.

The Baristas With Degrees​

While this generation was focused on earning degrees, the job market was worsening — slowly at first, then all at once. According to a paper by the Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein, recent graduates started doing significantly worse than older graduates around 2005, then fell much further behind during the Great Recession. The employment rate for recent graduates had yet to fully recover by the Covid-19 pandemic, which upended the job market all over again.

At the highest altitude, the problem was that the economy was producing more graduates but not as many of the jobs they traditionally held. Some economists argue that software had begun to eliminate jobs in fields like financial services and merchandise planning well before the rise of generative A.I.

On average, college graduates still earned a large premium over people with only a high school diploma. But the averages concealed the fact that some graduates were doing very well — like people who worked on Wall Street and in Big Tech — while many others were falling behind.

For decades, many young graduates had earned good money even if their jobs didn’t require a degree, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But many of those roles — like insurance agent and human resource worker — appeared to start paying less or disappearing in the 2000s and never recovered. A larger portion of these overqualified graduates ended up in jobs that didn’t pay well.

After earning his degree from Grinnell in 2014 and spending a year abroad on a prestigious Watson Fellowship, Mr. Hoffman became a barista at Starbucks. The idea was to buy time while he settled on a career path. (He had studied English and theater.) But seven years later, he was still at Starbucks — partly because the pandemic had delayed his professional plans. With a child on the way and money getting tight, he and his wife applied for temporary public assistance. The state rejected their application.

Mx. Burton, who in college had led a team that made a playable video game called KaiJr, struggled to find work as a designer after graduating in 2019. It turned out that designing video games, notwithstanding the university’s optimistic marketing material, was more akin to becoming a Hollywood actor than a computer programmer: The field could support only a small fraction of the millions of people eager to enter it. Mx. Burton eventually took a much more tedious job testing video games for glitches, for $15 an hour.

“My student loans were about to kick in, and I don’t have a job yet,” Mx. Burton said. “You have to not be picky anymore.”

As Ms. Barrett prepared to graduate with a degree in communications from Towson in 2018, she applied for dozens of jobs in fields like marketing and professional training at the likes of Accenture, Amazon and Stanley Black & Decker. After getting no bites, and with roughly $50,000 in debt, she went full time at the Apple Store where she had worked in college. The store often seduced college graduates with job titles like “Genius” and “Expert,” along with its generous benefits, but Ms. Barrett had still hoped for more.

Class Confidence​

In his 2000 book, “Bobos in Paradise,” David Brooks identified a new upper class of bourgeois bohemians — a demographic of techies, financiers and tenured professors who had the earning power and ideology of the bourgeois but the tastes and habits of bohemians. They favored balanced budgets and free trade. They went on expensive ski vacations and kept second homes. But they decorated them with reclaimed-wood furniture and grew heirloom produce in the backyard.

By the early 2020s, young college-educated adults were in some sense the mirror image of Mr. Brooks’s Bobos. They were often bourgeois in their tastes. They cradled sleek smartphones and watched prestige TV on demand. But the previous decade and a half had bequeathed them the bank accounts — and the politics — of the proletariat.

Polling by the Pew Research Center showed that the portion of college graduates with positive views of socialism roughly doubled during the 2010s, to over 40 percent. The shift helped fuel the rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — left-wing figures who built mass appeal.

The ideology of these disaffected college graduates didn’t end with economics. At the most fundamental level, their politics elevated the underdog. They were more likely than non-graduates to call out the harassers of women and gay and transgender people. They worried about racism and climate change, were growing skeptical of law enforcement and believed the Iraq war had been a mistake.

Perhaps the most visible expression of this ideology came at work, where many college graduates increasingly saw themselves as the underdog. They began to unionize at previously nonunion workplaces, like video game studios, architecture firms and banks. In 2023, hundreds of doctors in Minnesota and Wisconsin, fed up with mergers and acquisitions that had made them feel like cogs in the medical-industrial complex, formed what was the largest union of private-sector physicians in the country.

And it was the college graduates stuck in jobs that didn’t require a degree who seemed most determined to take on their employers. College had taught them to question. It had instilled in them what the sociologist Ruth Milkman called “class confidence” — a sense of agency that comes from knowing how to work the system, a broader perspective than the day-to-day grind.

But at the cash register, with the manager looking on, they had to smile and take whatever the customer gave them.

“I have been pretty hard on myself thinking the exhaustion was just me having an attitude problem,” Mr. Hoffman wrote to a friend during his second year at Starbucks. “But there are just too many human interactions in which you aren’t recognized as a human.” He was darkly amused by a customer who, referring to the name displayed on his apron, remarked: “I didn’t know you guys had names!”

Mr. Hoffman helped organize his store in Chicago, one of more than 600 that would unionize beginning in 2021, after years of perceived indignities.

“If you’re going to be disrespected like this,” he told me, “you have to have a bigger piece of the pie.”

The Vanishing Diploma Divide?​

Since President Trump’s first term, and especially since his re-election, political analysts have pointed to the gap between college-educated voters and those without degrees as one of the most significant fissures in American politics.

In 2024, Mr. Trump won non-college voters by almost 15 points, while losing the college educated by a similar margin. By contrast, non-college voters had narrowly backed a Democrat, Mr. Obama, as recently as 2012.

To explain the growing divide, commentators typically emphasize how the college educated are more liberal on social and cultural issues than those without degrees, and how these issues have played a bigger role in deciding elections over the past generation.

But that analysis tells only half the story of how American politics has shifted. Critically, it misses how the views of college-educated voters on economic questions have come to resemble those of voters without degrees.

A 2023 paper by the political scientist William Marble found that college graduates were well to the right of voters without a degree on economic issues during the 1980s and 1990s. But they began drifting leftward around 2004, and by 2020 college graduates were somewhat to the left of non-graduates on these issues.

More strikingly, the entire outlook of college graduates appears to have changed. During the Reagan and Clinton eras, many college-educated workers saw themselves as management-adjacent — as future executives and aspiring professionals being groomed for a life of affluence. They did not believe they had much in common with the working class. In the late 1990s, only slightly more than half supported labor unions, according to Gallup.

But by this decade, college graduates often identified more with rank-and-file workers than with employers. According to Gallup, about three-quarters of college graduates supported autoworkers and Hollywood writers in standoffs with their employers in 2023, when both groups went on strike. That matches their support for labor unions overall.

Matt Hoffman, one of the doctors who recently unionized in Minnesota (and no relation to Teddy), told me that he took his children to a United Automobile Workers picket line in 2023. “In our society, the sides are workers versus management,” he said. “I wanted them to understand that.”

In a high-wattage presidential election, when the country was primarily focused on cultural issues, college graduates and those without a degree often appeared to have little in common. But when it came to how they felt about their bosses or their bank accounts, it was suddenly harder to tell them apart. They were no longer on opposite teams.

How this will all play out is still up in the air, but Mr. Hoffman’s store in Chicago may offer an early clue. The staff was a mix of college graduates, college students and employees who didn’t aspire to a four-year degree. One employee earned a welding certificate while at Starbucks and later became an apprentice pipe fitter. But regardless of their educational backgrounds, they almost all voted to unionize the store in 2022. The final tally was 20 to 3.
 

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