In what states are whites without college degrees more Democratic

[King of Kensington]

...than college-educated whites?

[ElectionsGuy]

I'd make a good case for some Midwestern states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Many white suburban counties with more college graduates - Waukesha, WI, Dallas, IA, Carver, MN, Wright, MN, Ozaukee, WI are more Republican than their rural white counterparts. That's about it though, can't think of many other areas.

[RINO Tom]

In 2014, Republicans won 57% of White college graduates and 64% of Whites without a degree ... the difference isn't that large.  Republicans do very well with White voters in most places.  So, to answer your question, I would say probably more places than you would initially think, but probably not that many places overall.

[Extrabase500]

Maybe Iowa? Vermont? Maine?

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

I assumed nowhere. In the south, a college degree is associated with being more Republican, but I assume that's all racial.

[Adam Griffin]

There is actually a fairly objective answer to this, if you are willing to use 2008 Obama exit poll data in order to arrive at a conclusion (the exit polls then included "education by race" breakdowns). I realize this data is 7 years old, but it's about the best anybody is going to be able to do for answering the question for all 50 states from the same set of data. I've compiled it here.

Maroon states are those where college educated whites are more Democratic than whites without a college degree.

Green states are those where whites without a college degree are more Democratic than college educated whites.

Yellow states are statistically tied (less than 2 percentage points between each group).

Note: D.C. didn't have data on whites without college degrees (too small of a sample size) so I've left it yellow.



I actually think that for most of these yellow states and when dealing with "generic D" (a statewide or local candidate, for instance) who isn't black and/or Obama, non-college whites would be slightly more D than college whites. Some of the green ones (like Kentucky) would probably flip, too, though I haven't shown them here. Maybe something like this:

[All Along The Watchtower]

There is actually a fairly objective answer to this, if you are willing to use 2008 Obama exit poll data in order to arrive at a conclusion (the exit polls then included "education by race" breakdowns). I realize this data is 7 years old, but it's about the best anybody is going to be able to do for answering the question for all 50 states from the same set of data. I've compiled it here.

Maroon states are those where college educated whites are more Democratic than whites without a college degree.

Green states are those where whites without a college degree are more Democratic than college educated whites.

Yellow states are statistically tied (less than 2 percentage points between each group).

Note: D.C. didn't have data on whites without college degrees (too small of a sample size) so I've left it yellow.



I actually think that for most of these yellow states and when dealing with "generic D" (a statewide or local candidate, for instance) who isn't black and/or Obama, non-college whites would be slightly more D than college whites. Some of the green ones (like Kentucky) would probably flip, too, though I haven't shown them here. Maybe something like this:

Yeah, Obama had unusually high (for a Democrat )  appeal to college-educated whites in 2008. Part of that was the economic meltdown, and part of that was the fact that the Republican ticket projected a more populist image (especially with Palin, who in some ways was a sign of things to come re: Trump ).

The other thing, as you allude to, is that whites without degrees are, as a group, considerably more hostile to Obama (and by extension, Democrats in general -  particularly at the present time, though again, I suspect that more of that has to do with hostility toward Obama than hostility toward Democrats per se...) than college-educated whites are. Part of that is racial, but part of that is also class resentment - and tied to the urban-rural divide. When race and class factors are combined with the real sense that the increasingly globalized economy is leaving this group behind (and that said demographic is declining overall as a share of the population and electorate)....well, enter Donald Trump to tap into that.

[Ban my account ffs!]

I think the general way of things is that "Some college" is the most Republican group with things trending more Democratic in both directions away from that.  So a 9th grade dropout and a PhD are most likely to be Democrats while Johnny Drank Too Much At Northwestern Oklahoma State is likely to be the Republican.

[King of Kensington]

Seems to be more of a phenomenon in the Great Lakes/rust belt (Illinois, Michigan etc.) than anywhere else.  Which kinda makes sense.  There's some residual white working class voting for the "labor party", while the sort of upscale educated liberalism is less common than it is in say, the Boston-Washington corridor and California.

The "yellow" pattern in much of the South makes sense because Obama especially and Democrats in general aren't popular among whites period.

Utah and Oklahoma, besides being super-GOP states, seem kind of random.  Obviously there's few upscale educated liberals in those states.

[King of Kensington]

Here are the states where Obama won whites without college degrees in 2008.

Hawaii  64%
Vermont  61%
Massachusetts  57%
Rhode Island  57%
Maine  56%
Oregon  54%
Illinois  53%
Delaware  52%
Iowa  52%
Michigan  52%
Wisconsin  52%
Connecticut  51%
Washington  51%
New Hampshire  50%
Minnesota  49%

[Source: Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser, How Barack Obama Won]

So basically Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes and upper Midwest, and New England. Working class whites in New York and California are actually Republican (and they're quite a small share of the population in the big metropolitan centers), it's minorities and college-educated whites that make the states so Democratic.