Trump Won Because of a 'Class Rebellion' Against Educated Elitists Like Hillary Clinton, CNN's Fareed Zakaria Says

"Why or how did Donald Trump win?" Ask this question and you're likely to get myriad answers, because everyone has a theory—however harebrained or cogently logical it may seem. The theories range from Hillary Clinton being a flawed candidate to Democrats having lost touch with the electorate, from a racist backlash against Barack Obama to the Trump campaign's having moved voters who felt displaced or unheard. Others would point to "Pizzagate" and "fake news."

CNN's Fareed Zakaria delved a little deeper on Monday when he said on CNN's New Day that Trump's stunning election victory came down to one thing: open "class rebellion" against educated elitists.

"The election of Donald Trump is really a kind of a class rebellion against people like us, educated professionals who live in cities, who have cosmopolitan views about a lot of things," Zakaria said, according to The Hill.

He added, "I think there's a whole part of America that's sick and tired of being told what to do by this overeducated professional elite that Hillary Clinton in many ways perfectly represented, and that's why they're sticking with him."

The argument does take on significant weight when juxtaposed with a recent poll on the country's views about getting a college education. The Pew Research Center survey, released earlier this month, showed 58 percent of Republicans felt higher education had a negative impact on the country. This was the first year Pew received a majority of such responses, and it reflected a major swing from 2015's results, which showed 54 percent of GOP members held the opposite opinion.

Meanwhile, 72 percent of Democrats claimed getting a college education had a positive impact.

"The sense that their country's changing because of immigrants, because maybe blacks are rising up to a central place in society, because of gays being afforded equal rights, because of, frankly, a lot of working women," Zakaria said. "Everyone is sort of muscling in on the territory that, if you think about it, the white working man had."

Indeed, when parsing the results of 2016's election, Trump did much better than Clinton among voters with lesser educations. The Democrat actually improved on Barack Obama's 2012 showing in counties with the most educated voters, according to FiveThirtyEight.