Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinions

Ilyana Kuziemko from Princeton, Columbia’s Ebonya Washington, Gavin Wright from Stanford and Jiwon Choi from Brandeis University published a study a few years ago on one of the key episodes in the transition: President Bill Clinton’s break from a quarter-century of Democratic protectionism to launch the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, despite outright opposition from organized labor.

The study documented particularly steep job losses starting in the mid-1990s in counties tied to industries exposed to competition from Mexico. Most of these counties had long voted Democratic. By the year 2000, however, they had tilted toward Republicans in House elections.

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It’s not all Clinton’s fault, though. Another study by Kuziemko, with Suresh Naidu and Nicolas Longuet-Marx from Columbia, detects the Democratic shift against working-class priorities starting as far back as the Carter administration.

The rise of the New Democrats, they argue, moved the party away from its traditional attachment to unions, job guarantees, minimum wages and protectionist trade policies. The Democratic platform dropped its support for “pre-distribution” — policies designed to improve workers’ lot in the job market — and bought into the notion that the government should let market forces rip and deploy a social safety net to assist the economy’s losers, using taxes and government transfers to redistribute prosperity downward.

College-educated Democrats supported this evolution, well-suited as it was to their role in a tech-heavy globalized economy that rewarded their skills. But the old party base of blue-collar workers without a college education did not. They much prefer policies aimed at protecting good jobs, even if that detracts from the economic efficiency of markets. As the Democratic platform moved against their wishes, they moved to the GOP.

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Combing through voter party-identification surveys over the years, the researchers found that in the 1940s every additional year of education was associated with a three-percentage-point decrease in the odds that respondents would identify as Democrats. Today, the relationship is exactly reversed.

Republicans are, of course, no more supportive of unions and guaranteed federal jobs than even the most market-friendly Democrats. But their conservative social agenda scored higher among many less-educated voters — especially White voters — who were not enamored with Democrats’ support for liberal goals such as affirmative action. When Trump in 2016 argued that “NAFTA is the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere, but certainly ever signed in this country,” they knew they had found a new home.

Several dynamics surely contributed to the pro-market shift in the Democratic platform, including the stagflation of the 1970s, which discredited strategies that relied on government intervention in the economy. But the........

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