Many Democratic voters — and not a few pundits — have found the 2024 presidential election outcome to be profoundly puzzling and disorienting: How could so many minorities and working-class Americans have voted for Donald Trump? 

One observer who found Trump’s showing with these groups to be unsurprising is Steve Bumbaugh. Ever since the 1990s, he has worked on issues involving college access, upward mobility, race, and class. For some of that time, he worked with large organizations such as the College Board, which is the one of the key institutions that has shaped the modern meritocracy through college entrance tests such as the SAT and Advanced Placement courses and exams. At other points in his career, he worked directly with young people from disadvantaged communities. His work with students in a deeply impoverished inner-city neighborhood in Washington D.C. during the early 1990s, when the city was known as the nation’s “Murder Capital,” is described in the documentary Southeast 67.      

In this podcast conversation, Bumbaugh discusses the rise and fall of public school integration efforts in America — an arc whose impact he experienced personally as well as professionally. He describes current criticisms of meritocracy, particularly at the level of selective college admissions, and the ways in which the elite universities could do more to make the system more representative as well as more truly meritocratic. Bumbaugh reflects on the working-class anger and frustration that helped drive Trump’s reelection in 2024, much of which was invisible to the Democratic Party as it transformed into a predominantly college-educated, managerial- and professional-class party. And he concludes that the Democrats “don’t have the ability to communicate on the same level as Donald Trump. They had better do something.”