WASHINGTON >> By their political choices in this century, Americans are refuting a 20th-century belief: that in this society, class distinctions are not persistent, or perhaps even real. Elections are also producing inversions of political behavior in voter cohorts defined by education and wealth.

Class antagonisms have often fueled politics. Federalists, typified by Manhattanite Alexander Hamilton, desired a restless, churning urban nation and opposed the Jeffersonian vision of a republic of rural yeomen. Andrew Jackson, slayer of the national bank, intensified tensions between capital and labor, and between elites and the rest. These tensions intensified during the industrialism unleashed by the Civil War and mass immigration.

By mid-20th century, however, postwar triumphalism included the idea of America as uniquely classless and socially fluid. Then federal policies began encouraging higher education to be a general aspiration, expecting this to dissolve residual classes with the solvent of upward mobility.

Instead, postsecondary education has become a status marker and a source of the snobbery that fuels the resentments of America’s non-college majority. The education divide threatens to become a calcified class distinction akin to race as predictive of political behavior.

Of course race still matters more. In 2008, Barack Obama won a higher percentage of white votes than Michael Dukakis did in 1988, or John Kerry did in 2004, or Hillary Clinton did in 2016. But Obama, after receiving 43 percent of that vote in 2008, got 39 percent in 2012, and Clinton won just 37 percent in 2016. If her turnouts and percentages of minority support had matched Obama’s four years earlier in five states, she would have won Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Florida and the presidency.

White voters without college educations were two-thirds of the 1964 electorate, but only one-third in 2016. In that year, however, Clinton lost college-educated whites by 31 points, double Obama’s 2012 loss. In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 84 of the 100 counties with the highest percentages of voters with college degrees. In 1980, Ronald Reagan trounced Jimmy Carter in those counties, 76-24.

Education levels broadly correlate with incomes. Today, Democrats represent 14 of the 16 congressional districts with the highest percentages of bachelor’s degrees. In 1980, Carter won slightly more than 35 percent of voters in the top third of income earners; in 2000, Al Gore won more than 45 percent; in 2016, Clinton won a majority, as did Biden in 2020.

The “college-educated and affluent vote” is not, however, a synonym for the “suburban vote.” Political analyst Ruy Teixeira notes online:

Less than one-third of the suburban vote nationwide is college-educated. Three-fifths of suburban white voters are non-college. “Overall, according to Gallup, just 30 percent of adults with a four-year degree only describe themselves as liberal and 36 percent of those with some postgraduate education (the less numerous group) do so.”

Teixeira calculates that perhaps only one-ninth of suburban voters are white college-educated liberals. So, he concludes, Democrats’ hold on the suburban vote “is far more tenuous” than is commonly assumed. According to an AP VoteCast survey, in 2022 Democrats carried the suburban vote nationwide by a single point, down nine points from 2020. This, Teixeira says, challenges what he calls Democrats’ “touching faith that the anti-MAGA playbook will work anytime anywhere.”

A recently published poll showed something probably unprecedented: A larger percentage of Democrats (55) than Republicans (48) expressed trust in business. Perhaps the former identify with, and the latter resent, business understood as large corporations. And they are understood by both Democrats and Republicans as large bureaucratic entities — not unlike government — run by credentialed elites.

The 2022 elections blew in on a hurricane of hyperbole about “existential” threats to democracy, which supposedly were “on the ballot.” Yet turnout (107 million) was down from 2018 (114 million). Perhaps this was because Trump was neither on the ballot nor in office. If Trump is not atop the Republicans’ 2024 ticket, a significant number of his “low propensity voters” might stay home, unless the politics of animosity finds another vehicle.

Speaking of vehicles, there is a cultural variable that is pertinent to political predictions. For more than 40 years, the Ford F-series truck has been the nation’s best-selling vehicle — not just the best-selling truck. Do you own one or know anyone who does? If your answer is “yes,” or if it is “no,” you probably are a member of, and a stranger to, a large American (if you will forgive the expression) class.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com