I gathered county level data on the vote count in the 2024 presidential general election (source) as well as educational attainment (source) and created a scatter plot using Google Sheets.

I derived political leaning of a county by subtracting Harris' vote percent from Trump's, meaning if the difference is positive, Trump won, and as the difference increases, so too does the breadth of his victory; conversely, if the difference is negative, that means Harris won and as the difference increases, so too does her victory. I assume that as the gap between candidates gets wider, a county's residents can be assumed to be increasingly politically unified.

Educational attainment is measured by the percent of a county's residents that have at least a four year degree.

One possible explanation for the stark education disparity: the ratio of red to blue counties is 85:15, while the ratio of Trump to Harris votes nationally was 51:49. This means blue counties have much higher populations than red and it can be assumed easier access to higher education.

Only 10% of blue counties saw a vote gap greater than 50%, compared to 71% of red counties. The greatest blue county vote gap was Washington DC with 86%, while 13 red counties had vote gaps greater than 86%.

Whatever the cause, among conservatives, as educational attainment decreases, political enthusiasm increases, dramatically.

Posted by JaraSangHisSong

16 comments

  1. The axes should be flipped! If you have left and right leanings why visualize them vertically?

  2. The craziest thing is that before Trump came along Republicans usually won college educated voters.

    Romney won college educated voters 53-40 before Trump decided to make ignorance a key part of the Republican platform.

  3. I was a bit confused at first with the Educational Achievement on the x-axis. I understand why that is, but if the chart were 90° CCW, it makes more sense to me.

    Awesome chart.

  4. It’s actually interesting, because the Republicans constantly harp on about how (to them) “so-called” educated people are against them, but actually the truth seems to be that places that vote for Trump are just highly uneducated on the whole.

  7. And that’s why Democrats want to forgive student loans and Republicans don’t.

  8. And you wonder why the right demonizes higher education

  9. Counties are not meaningful to elections for anything other than the county government.

  11. r/dataisbeautiful should start banning posts that use “counties” as a system of measurement.

    There are litterally over a hundred counties with populations larger than 500k (more than the State of Wyoming)

    Meanwhile, there are over a hundred counties with a population of less than 5000…

    There are roughly a dozen counties that are uninhabited.

  12. As tempting though it may be to use educational achievement as an indirect metric for intelligence, it’s more of a metric for opportunity than anything else in a country where education is so cripplingly expensive and access to quality primary education isn’t evenly distributed across geography.

  14. Making the cutoff 18+ with a 4 year degree seems wrong. It may breate a bias twords counties with older populations as almost nobody under the age of 21 has a college degree. A similar chart, looking at the % of people over the age of 22 or 23 (or even 25) would likely help deal with this bias.

  15. How many 18-20yo’s have a 4yr (bachelor) degree?!?

    That being said, interesting chart.

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