Educational attainment vs. Trump percentage of PV by state

[SingingAnalyst]

Based on 52 data pairs (the 50 states plus DC plus the US as a whole), giving each equal weight, the correlation between the percentage of population 25+ with a bachelor's degree and percentage of vote that went to Trump is -0.83, which is very strong.

69% of the variability in Trump's percentage is explainable by the percentage of the population with a bachelor's degree.

Has any other election features such a strong relationship between educational attainment and support for one candidate?

[Nym90]

Based on 52 data pairs (the 50 states plus DC plus the US as a whole), giving each equal weight, the correlation between the percentage of population 25+ with a bachelor's degree and percentage of vote that went to Trump is -0.83, which is very strong.

69% of the variability in Trump's percentage is explainable by the percentage of the population with a bachelor's degree.

Has any other election features such a strong relationship between educational attainment and support for one candidate?

Almost certainly not.

Nate Silver had a great article on this a few weeks back. The conclusion was even when you control for income, education was still highly predictive of the vote. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/

[The_Doctor]

Based on 52 data pairs (the 50 states plus DC plus the US as a whole), giving each equal weight, the correlation between the percentage of population 25+ with a bachelor's degree and percentage of vote that went to Trump is -0.83, which is very strong.

69% of the variability in Trump's percentage is explainable by the percentage of the population with a bachelor's degree.

Has any other election features such a strong relationship between educational attainment and support for one candidate?

Source? I'd be interested.

[Nym90]

Another interesting conclusion was that education mattered even after controlling for race, in such that Trump improved upon Romney's showing in low educated minority areas but went down in more highly educated minority areas.

The education gap was much higher with whites but it does appear to have been a factor even for minority voters as well. In the past I don't believe there was ever much if any tendency for more educated minority voters to vote differently from less educated ones.

When it comes to income, higher income was still more predictive of voting for Trump and lower income of voting for Clinton, once you control for education.

In other words, education was without a doubt the prime motivating factor in any changes in the vote between 2012 and 2016.

[SingingAnalyst]

Based on 52 data pairs (the 50 states plus DC plus the US as a whole), giving each equal weight, the correlation between the percentage of population 25+ with a bachelor's degree and percentage of vote that went to Trump is -0.83, which is very strong.

69% of the variability in Trump's percentage is explainable by the percentage of the population with a bachelor's degree.

Has any other election features such a strong relationship between educational attainment and support for one candidate?

Source? I'd be interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_educational_attainment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2016#Results_by_state

I copied the first table into Excel after sorting by Bachelor's Degree attainment, treating each of the 50 states plus DC plus the US as a whole as 52 equally weighted entities, used vlookup to paste the Trump percentage, and ran a simple linear regression (Trump percentage vs. Bachelor's degree attainment percentage).  Took all of 2 minutes.

What I find remarkable is the sheer consistency of the pattern. WV, the least educated state as measured by percentage of Bachelor degree holders, was within a fraction of a percent (behind WY) as Trump's best state. Of course DC is the most educated and Trump's worst area. I suspect a similar pattern of Trump support vs. Post grad degree holders, but not high school graduates (ironically, WY, Trump's best state, also has the highest percentage of HS grads--91.8%).

[SingingAnalyst]

As a follow-up, the correlation between Trump % and postgrad % is -0.835, and the correlation between Trump % and HS grad % is -0.154 (not statistically significant).