College-educated population is concentrating in urban areas.

[Beet]

http://www.creativeclass.org/rfcgdb/articles/Where_the%20Brains_Are.pdf

Scroll down to page 2 and look at the 2000 map of college graduates per residents. Does it remind you of Dave's 2004 swing maps? Because it sure does to me.

[Beet]

There are two ways to get census data on this, from the following link

http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en

Easy way: Go to fact sheet
More complicated way (with more data): Click get data, Summary File 3, quick tables, detailed data, by subject, Social characteristics, Education

Righto. I have seen the census data before, but it didn't remind me of Dave's maps so explicitly. The change from 1970 is amazing as well.

As a note, straight up survey data finds that those with a bachelor's degree are most Republican, while those with no college and those with post-bach's are more Democratic. However, once you control for race and income, there becomes a linear positive relationship between education and voting Democratic.

[Beet]

There are two ways to get census data on this, from the following link

http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en

Easy way: Go to fact sheet
More complicated way (with more data): Click get data, Summary File 3, quick tables, detailed data, by subject, Social characteristics, Education

Righto. I have seen the census data before, but it didn't remind me of Dave's maps so explicitly. The change from 1970 is amazing as well.

As a note, straight up survey data finds that those with a bachelor's degree are most Republican, while those with no college and those with post-bach's are more Democratic. However, once you control for race and income, there becomes a linear positive relationship between education and voting Democratic.

No, those 42% of voters with a 4 year degree are slightly more Democratic than average, they had a 49-49 tie for President in 2004.  Thos 16% who went to graduate school supported Kerry 55-44, while those 26% who didn't supported Bush 52-46. I'm sure that those with PhDs were greater than 55% for Kerry.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html

Those with a bachelor's degree excluding post-bach's are more Republican than average.

[Beet]

there becomes a linear positive relationship between education and voting Democratic.

That's about as suprising as finding out that there is a direct link between the % of blue collar workers in a given area how likely that area is to vote for the Labour Party

Here are some actual numbers from a quick and dirty regression based off of the University of Michigan's National Election Studies. The depent variable I used was a number ranging from -2 (strong Kerry supporter) to +2 (strong Bush supporter). N=985 observations. The actual coefficients are meaningless in comparison (in the model without taking party into account, the effect of going from a grade 8 education to grad degree is about 62% of the effect of being black; in the model with party, it is about twice the effect) so just looking at t-values:

Without party id:
education (-3.35)**
household income (4.01)**
black dummy variable (-9.13)**
R^2=.103

With party id:
partyid (36.84)**
education (-3.06)**
household income (1.68)
black dummy variable (-2.60)**
R^2=.624

The interesting thing is how more educated Republicans and Democrats alike were more likely to be for Kerry, regardless of party identification.