In 2008, political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira wrote a report for Brookings titled âThe Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class,â about two trends that were noticeable then and are overwhelmingly obvious now: The White working class was shrinking and moving toward the Republican Party, while the number of college-educated workers with incomes over $100,000 had grown enormously, and they were increasingly voting for Democrats. Rereading Teixeira and Abramowitz today, one is struck by their eerie prescience, but also by the fundamental difficulty of holding together a Democratic Party where highly educated and affluent adults are the ascending faction but are not numerous enough to carry an election by themselves. This past year, that difficulty has come into sharp focus as the pandemic has set the educated class that leads the party on a collision course with its traditional union base.