Trump Voters

As part of my on-going—and mostly unsuccessful—efforts to try to understand why people would vote for Trump, I made a chart for "state voters by education level." One thing led to another and pretty soon I had a quite a few "state voters by 'quality of life' charts." The overall results are certainly among the most interesting, most jarring, clearest and saddest blog entries I've ever posted. Judge for yourself.

The data is largely self-explanatory, but here are some notes anyway.

The colors represent how the states voted (via electoral college) in the 2020 presidential election: red for Republican, blue for Democrat, non-colored for unknown at this time. The source of the data is provided at the bottom of each chart. I used only data sources where I could get a definite top-to-bottom listing of the states for the category indicated. All figures are "rates" and/or "per capita."

If I have referred you to this post and your political orientation is not leftish, I did it because I think it's important that all politically-interested people from all parties see and digest this data. The charts and data are not, of course, partisan in themselves, and I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I believe that the data are hugely revealing, and there are important socio-economic-political conclusions to be drawn therefrom.

Spreadsheet notes: This spreadsheet is live; it lives on my computer and is automatically updated as needed. Scroll down using slider on right margin. If you're interested in using the data for your own purposes, there's an option to download the spreadsheet at the bottom.

Notes on Titles and Data

"Education Attainment" refers to the number of years of formal schooling.

"Opportunity" refers to the Opportunity Index, which is "an annual composite measure of economic, educational and civic factors that foster opportunity. The Opportunity Index was jointly developed by Opportunity Nation and Measure of America and measures 16 indicators, including Unemployment Rate, Low Income Inequality, Access to Banking, Access to Broadband Internet, Overall Education and more." Quoted description taken from the website.  See https://opportunityindex.org/ for details.

"Poverty" refers to the percentage of the state population living in poverty. Since the poverty rate is determined by, among other things, cost of living, there is no specific dollar amount that defines the poverty level. For more details, search Wikipedia for "us states poverty rate."