Atlantic Writer George Packer Suggests Black, Latino Voters Like Trump Because They Didn’t Go To College

A man picks out Harris-Walz campaign posters at a campaign event in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, on October 13, 2024. | Source: NurPhoto / Getty

A writer for a popular online news magazine is under fire for suggesting that Black and Latino voters are gravitating toward supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy over Kamala Harris because they don’t have college educations.

George Packer made his comments during an interview with MSNBC while discussing a recent article he penned in the Atlantic about “the three factors that will decide the election.”

A brief portion of Packer’s interview has gone viral for his opinion on what is driving the polling numbers that show that more Black and Latino voters intend to support Trump on Election Day than they have for his past two presidential campaigns.

“The sharpest divide in our politics today is education,” Packer said during the MSNBC interview. “It’s whether you have a college degree or not. That is the likeliest determinant of if you are going to vote Republican or Democrat. And that’s why we’re seeing larger numbers — and I met some of them in Western Pennsylvania — of Latinos and Black voters who are moving toward Trump.”

It would appear that Packer wasn’t just suggesting that Black and Latino voters are not making themselves aware of what is at stake in this election in order to make an informed decision at the ballot box. Instead, he specifically pointed to the lack of “a college degree,” suggesting that Black and Latino voters who plan to support Trump on Election Day will do so because they don’t have enough book smarts.

Beyond that, Packer said it’s that purported lack of a college education that decides which political party they side with on Election Day.

Cynics could — and did — interpret Packer’s words to mean that he thinks Black and Latino voters are not intelligent enough to knowingly make informed decisions about political candidates.

“George Packer is a racist,” one X account responded to the viral clip of the interview.

“So this @TheAtlantic writer, George Packer, is claiming that Blacks and Latinos are voting for Trump because they are uneducated,” another posted.

“As a Latino with an MBA, I find the ‘educated people’ argument not only laughable but also incredibly insulting to those who chose not to incur crippling debt to attain some sort of false social status,” another post claimed. “I’ve learned just as much, if not more, from people who did not pursue higher education than from those who did.”

The truth is that despite Trump seeing gains in support among Black male voters, in particular, all Black voters have overwhelmingly voted Democrat for decades, including the past two presidential elections in which Trump was a candidate.

Packer didn’t appear to account for that trend and say how education — or an alleged lack thereof — factored into those elections.

That said, a new poll found that 25% of young Black men are supporting Trump while “44 percent of young Latino men said they’d back Trump, an improvement over the roughly 38 percent who backed him in 2020,” Politico reported.

However, there is no indication of why Trump has made these gains, including any reference to a lack of education.

According to Census data, nearly 38% of the U.S. population who are at least 25 years old held bachelor’s degrees as of 2022.

“From 2012 to 2022, the percentage of adults age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or more increased from 34.5% to 41.8% for the non-Hispanic White population; from 21.2% to 27.6% for the Black population; from 51% to 59.3% for the Asian population; and from 14.5% to 20.9% for the Hispanic population,” Census reported.

This is America.

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