The problem in the US today is not only that a very large and angry portion of the electorate is uneducated and uninformed, but that it is proudly, willfully, and stubbornly so. They are under the illusion that the active MIS-informed by a longstanding diet of bad rightwing cable news pundits is the real information.
I have been leftist for twenty years and all this time I have extensively read a very renowned center-left newspaper on a daily basis (Le Monde - I still read it but complement it with extremist medias).
And one day I did realize that I had been disinformed for decades by this renowned newspaper. While it is far above the league on many points (international relationships for one), it is nothing more than a vulgar propaganda organ when it comes to societal issues.
I came to this understanding over two years when I decided to investigate the issues around Islam by myself. I did so with a leftist-minded and pro-Muslim approach, despite an extensive first-hand negative experience of Muslim communities and of their problems decades ago. Problems that I once believed would disappear with time. What I learned shattered my views.
Let's take demography and the fears of a replacement of our population with Muslims. Liberal newspapers will mock this and tell you that there are only 8% of Muslims in France. True (partially: other methodologies give 11%). But here is another true fact that I had to find by myself in an official report about education: in Paris' region, 30% of high schoolers are Muslims! And another true fact: over the last ten years, they have grown by 2.2% a year, which means their population in France doubles every thirty years.
Both facts are true, but they give very different pictures. A demographer would immediately understand that one must look at the youth when investigating the long-term consequences of immigration, yet the renowned media constantly repeat the superficial data and deliberately omit the significant ones. All of that with a moralizing tone and biases to signal the reader what the "good" positions are.
And medias are not the only problem: when 90% of social scientists are liberals (!) and many openly claim they work for "social justice", it is a big problem that is not compatible with a healthy scientific investigation. And there is this culture of American liberals to enforce a strong social repression against those who do not share their views through constant accusations, protests, outcries, activism, etc. This is smothering the political debate (another information seizure) because the zealots always win, until they lose faith.
You think that because you read a bit and have a degree, you are informed. I am sorry but being informed is very hard, and even though most of people I debate with are strongly educated and avid readers (almost as much as I am), they are nevertheless ignorant. Albeit arrogant enough to think they are knowledgeable. This arrogance also explains why education is positively correlated with superstitious beliefs.
There are two ways to learn reality: to find a good information (very hard to do), or to have the society stick your nose to it. Our blue collars are the ones most exposed to the Islamic immigration: they live with/among them, work with/among them while white collars are mostly shielded and only see the most westernized families, and are reliant on their liberal and biased medias.
You think blue collars vote for people like Trump because they are idiots, uneducated, racist bastards who deserve to die and that you hate (I caricature hopefully). But it never came to your mind that they are far more knowledgeable about immigration than you are thanks to a direct experience, and that they mostly have different interests from yours. It never came to your mind that modern economic trends have been degrading for them and do not offer them any hope for the future. I suggest you stop looking at them with such haughtiness if you really want to improve the political debates. Like it or not, you will have to find a compromise between both of you.