70% of Americans don't have college degrees. If you aimed to win an election, wouldn't you want 70% of all Americans supporting you? Trump won non-college whites by margin of 72-23-CBS News exit polls

If you wanted to win a US election, you'd aim for the 70% of Americans who don't have a college degree. CBS News shares Nov. 2016 exit poll of white voters without college degrees. 72% went for Trump and 23% for Hillary. Granted, this is only white voters, but the point is non-college voters aren't a special interest group you have to go looking for. They're the vast majority of America. If you mock them and they decide to vote, you're likely going to lose.

11/9/16, "CBS News Exit Polls: How Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency," CBS News, by Stanley Feldman and Melissa Herrmann 

"As expected, Trump did best among white voters without a college degree, beating Clinton by the enormous margin of 72 percent to 23 percent. Trump also won among white, non-college women 62 to 34 percent and white college-educated men, 54 to 39 percent. Among white voters, Clinton only won among women with a college degree by a 51 to 45 percent margin. Interestingly, among white voters, there is no evidence in the exit poll that income affected the likelihood that they supported Trump."...

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Added: Politifact says 70% of Americans don't have a college degree as of 2015

"Seventy percent of Americans "don't have a college degree."

 4/8/15, "70% of Americans don't have college degree, Rick Santorum says," Politifact, Katharina Fiedler 

"Rick Santorum, a potential candidate for president in 2016, argues that the Republican Party is not offering enough for America’s workers. The former senator from Pennsylvania said Republicans need to improve in reaching out to these voters on CBS’s Face the Nation on April 5, 2015.

"I think people are looking for someone to bring us together. And I put a book out last year called Blue Collar Conservatives, and it's the whole idea that we have to start bringing those who are being left behind by this economy. We have to give them an opportunity to be able to reach that American dream again. And I think Republicans, frankly, have been very weak on that," Santorum said.

After mentioning that Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, did not do a great job in reaching out to the working class, Santorum added:

"I think there's a lot of folks who are very disenchanted with both political parties because neither party is really talking about them and really saying what's the way forward for the 70 percent of Americans who don't have a college degree but, you know, want economic opportunity like everybody else
and nobody's talking about that."
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We wondered whether Santorum is correct that 70 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree. 

We checked with Santorum’s staff of his organization Patriot Voices, and they sent us an article from Vox about Scott Walker’s lack of a college diploma. The reporter argues that not having a college degree does not really matter since "most Americans — nearly 70 percent — don't have a bachelor's degree, either." The article doesn’t give a source for its number. 

We decided to look for data about educational attainment from the U.S. Census Bureau; we found 2014 data (the most recent available) on the U.S. population by age, race and gender. We focused on the age group of 25 years and over, because most American students graduate by the time they turn 25. 

According to census data, 209.3 million people in the United States are 25 years old or older, and 66.9 million have a bachelor’s degree or higher (such as a master’s, professional or doctoral degree). That means about 68 percent of them do not have a bachelor’s degree.  If we include people who have an academic associate degree -- about 11.7 million people -- the percentage of people without a degree declines slightly, to 62 percent. 

The U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics looked at the same question in a 2014 longitudinal study that followed young people to age 27. It found that by that age, 72 percent of respondents did not have bachelor's degrees. 

Our ruling
 
In making the point that Republicans need to reach out to the working class more, Santorum said that 70 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree. We found several measures that are close to the number Santorum cited. Overall, we rate his claim True."





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