While the Presidential election is too close to call, there are some tectonic long run trends that will continue in 2024, and will likely manifest at the state level. As we note in our prior post, there has been a long-run realignment of US politics around education, with more educated voters voting Democratic, and less educated voting Republican. Our data indicate that this relationship will continue to get stronger at the individual level in 2024; and we think it likely that there will also continue to be a strengthened relationship between percentage of vote for the Democratic nominee in 2024 and percent of the population that has at least a bachelor’s degree. This relationship has strengthened steadily during the 21st century. The plots below show the relationship between Democratic vote share and percent of population with a bachelor’s for 2000, 2012, 2016, and 2020. In 2000 we see a significant, but very noisy relationship between these two variables, with substantial outliers. Virginia, Colorado– two states with very high levels of education– had roughly the same Democratic vote share as West Virginia, the state with the lowest percentage of the 25+ population with Bachelor’s degrees. That has steadily and substantially changed since, where West Virginia has become among the most Republican leaning states in the country; and Colorado and Virginia have transitioned from being red leaning purple states, to being among the top 10 most Democratic leaning states. More generally, the slope of the relationship has become significantly steeper since 2000; and the spread around the trend line (captured by the R squared statistic, which is the proportion of the variation in Democratic vote share that is explained by the share of the population with Bachelor's degrees). There are many factors that will affect outcomes in particular states, but the 2020 chart, combined with our 2024 state-level survey data suggest a number of possible candidates for movement (e.g., Vermont, Hawaii, California, New York, Maryland are all above the curve and where our survey suggests downward movement in Democratic vote share; and Kansas, North Dakota, and Nebraska suggest upward movement in Democratic vote share). Among swing states, New Mexico and Nevada look at risk of downward movement for Democrats; while New Hampshire looks more likely to move up. The largest swing states– Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona– all sit very close to the curve, suggesting that there will not be significant movement either way driven by education levels, relative to 2020.
