White College Vote vs. White Non-College Vote

[RFayette]

Using CNN's exit polls, I decided to do a little bit of work using Excel/R to investigate the relationship between how college whites vs. non-college whites voted as well as how white men vs. white women voted in the states in which exit polls existed for 2016.

If I have more time, I will try to do something similar for previous years, but I think users may find this data interesting and it has some interesting data to sift through within it.

Note that in this plot:
x-axis = difference in GOP margin between how white men and white women voted (white men Trump margin - white women Trump margin)
y-axis = difference in GOP margin between how non-college educated whites and college-educated whites voted (college white margin - non-college-white margin)

Also if anyone else wants a CSV file to toy around with the data themselves, shoot me a PM and I can email it to you.

A few trends I notice immediately is that Trump clearly struggles far less with college whites in Ohio, Iowa, and Florida than the vast majority of states.  Also, with a calculated r value of -.033, there seems to be no connection between the gender gap and the education gap among whites in different states - as seen by outliers like Iowa and New Jersey, for instance.



I'm curious what other trends people notice here - I'll probably have some more fun with this later (and make the graph nicer), but it seems like there are some interesting trends to be seen from this data as it is.

Also, if you're having problems seeing the image, just go directly to the url, https://postimg.org/image/o8o6k9x89/

[P123]

Very interesting stuff, my guess is it's largely a Urban rural vs Divide. I bet Trump did better with Whites w/a degree in rural Iowa then he did with No Degree with Whites in SF, LA, or the Bay Area (or Portland, for that matter).

[Pennsylvania Deplorable]

That's probably the main reason. Also, older people are less likely to have degrees. They just didn't need them back when they were 18 and could get a good factory job right out of high school. Between age and geography, it makes sense for Trump to dominate whites without degrees.

Interestingly, Trump still did better among nonwhites with degrees than nonwhites without degrees. He also won the middle class and lost the poor. Based on the assumption that more education = more money, he would have done better with the poor and worse with the upper middle class than Romney. Instead, his income distribution was similar with relatively minor gains among poor whites.

[RFayette]

This is unsurprising to me.  Those who got college degrees or more and yet make below median incomes (or even below 75th percentile) are near unanimously Dem all over the country.  Keep in mind that grad students and most government employees <10 years out of school will fall in this category.  Conversely, people who make above the 75th percentile but didn't graduate college are near unanimously Rep just about everywhere.  Clinton lost because college grads above the 75th income percentile came home to Trump just enough.

Regarding the gender gap, I think it is something that has been massively overhyped for a while.  It's basically a 55/45 phenomenon.  At the end of the day, most spouses/partners still agree with each other.  It was also less of a phenomenon in the distant past, so it doesn't surprise me that Florida had one of the lowest gender gaps in the country.

I agree - it's pretty clear that education, not gender, played a more important role in most states.  The issue I think is more interesting is the Midwestern divide - specifically, the significantly smaller magnitude of the education gap in Iowa and Ohio compared to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois.  Do you think there's a reason for this?  I think P123's conjecture of an urban-rural divide may be the case - but Ohio still seems to be a weird case.

[RINO Tom]

This is unsurprising to me.  Those who got college degrees or more and yet make below median incomes (or even below 75th percentile) are near unanimously Dem all over the country.  Keep in mind that grad students and most government employees <10 years out of school will fall in this category.  Conversely, people who make above the 75th percentile but didn't graduate college are near unanimously Rep just about everywhere.  Clinton lost because college grads above the 75th income percentile came home to Trump just enough.

Regarding the gender gap, I think it is something that has been massively overhyped for a while.  It's basically a 55/45 phenomenon.  At the end of the day, most spouses/partners still agree with each other.  It was also less of a phenomenon in the distant past, so it doesn't surprise me that Florida had one of the lowest gender gaps in the country.

I agree - it's pretty clear that education, not gender, played a more important role in most states.  The issue I think is more interesting is the Midwestern divide - specifically, the significantly smaller magnitude of the gender gap in Iowa and Ohio compared to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois.  Do you think there's a reason for this?  I think P123's conjecture of an urban-rural divide may be the case - but Ohio still seems to be a weird case.

I don't know about most of your question, but in regard to Illinois: White men in IL, depending on the region but also regardless of the region (outside of the city of Chicago), are actually more Republican than those in IA, MN, WI and MI, if I remember correctly.

[RFayette]

This is unsurprising to me.  Those who got college degrees or more and yet make below median incomes (or even below 75th percentile) are near unanimously Dem all over the country.  Keep in mind that grad students and most government employees <10 years out of school will fall in this category.  Conversely, people who make above the 75th percentile but didn't graduate college are near unanimously Rep just about everywhere.  Clinton lost because college grads above the 75th income percentile came home to Trump just enough.

Regarding the gender gap, I think it is something that has been massively overhyped for a while.  It's basically a 55/45 phenomenon.  At the end of the day, most spouses/partners still agree with each other.  It was also less of a phenomenon in the distant past, so it doesn't surprise me that Florida had one of the lowest gender gaps in the country.

I agree - it's pretty clear that education, not gender, played a more important role in most states.  The issue I think is more interesting is the Midwestern divide - specifically, the significantly smaller magnitude of the gender education gap in Iowa and Ohio compared to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois.  Do you think there's a reason for this?  I think P123's conjecture of an urban-rural divide may be the case - but Ohio still seems to be a weird case.

I don't know about most of your question, but in regard to Illinois: White men in IL, depending on the region but also regardless of the region (outside of the city of Chicago), are actually more Republican than those in IA, MN, WI and MI, if I remember correctly.

My question was accidentally mis-worded - in fact, the gender gap is smaller in Illinois than Indiana.  I meant to describe the education gap.  I have a hard time believing white men in IL were more GOP than IA white men though, if the exit polls are to be believed - the gender gap was absolutely huge in Iowa (though the education gap was quite small).