Source: The Atlantic
By now, you’ve heard about the great American divide that ushered Donald Trump into office. It’s probably been pitched as a matter of money and wealth— prosperous city dwellers against the rural poor, or the white working class versus everyone else.
But that’s the wrong place to look. Education mattered more than anything else, it appears, even when controlling for economic factors.
States submitting their final election returns have made it possible to dig deeper into local ballots, combining Census demographics and county-level turnout to make conclusions with statistical heft. The chart below tracks 15 demographic factors and the relative strength they held in this election, as modeled through linear regression (and controlling for total votes and Mitt Romney’s 2012 turnout, which strips away some predictable partisan patterns):
Education is tricky, because it’s tied up with so many other things. College graduates are generally more liberal; they’re also more insulated against unemployment and outsourcing than your average blue-collar factory worker (though that certainly could change). And, of course, there’s the ever-widening income gap between college graduates and everyone else. What looks like a strong correlation between higher education and opposition to Trump might just be a proxy for a hidden economic variable.
But if that’s the case, it’s not a simple connection. The education gap persists even when controlling for a county’s median income, its industrial base, and whether it has lost local manufacturing jobs. All those factors predict support for Trump, but not to the degree that education does. Neither does population density, a decent indictor for whether voters live in a rural or urban area.
Counties with well-educated residents consistently broke against Trump even when they weren’t particularly wealthy, as Nate Silver recently noted was the case with his hometown in Michigan. They voted Democratic even when surrounded by relatively red-leaning neighbors (see Harrisonburg, Virginia, or Asheville, North Carolina). Some of the counties hosted college towns, distorting their overall demographics, but not all of them. Something about living in a better-educated area made people favor Clinton, and it didn’t have as much to do with money as widely suggested.
Categories: America, Education, The Muslim Times, USA