I think that despite the analysis of the election around urban/rural and college educated/uneducated the common denominator is jobs. In the United States today it’s nearly a given that in order for one to get a good paying job they must have a college degree. It also happens that those jobs are in urban areas. Further, while in the past there were plenty of good paying jobs in manufacturing that didn’t require college degrees, we manufacture less in the U.S. than before so an increasing majority of jobs not requiring degrees are in services. Service industries don’t pay high wages and are dependent on many external factors, which is why COVID has been so devastating to people in the U.S.

I don’t see one solution to the problem, the solution is a combination of decreasing the cost of getting a college degree, increasing existing service industry wages, and somehow increasing manufacturing in the United States. We must seek out and agree upon the incentives for doing each.