I visited AT&T Labs today–lots of fun, a great group of people, an interesting mix of statistics and machine learning. They showed me some cool visualizations that I’ll display soon.
Anyway, while I was there, somebody asked me about voters with different educational levels. In discussing it, we realized we wanted to break this down by ethnicity and age. So I quickly prepared a grid of graphs for him.
On the train ride back, I spent a few minutes making the graphs prettier:
These are based on raw Pew data, reweighted to adjust for voter turnout by state, income, and ethnicity. No modeling of vote on age, education, and ethnicity. I think our future estimates based on the 9-way model will be better, but these are basically OK, I think. All but six of the dots in the graph are based on sample sizes greater than 30.
My comment on my blog about these charts:
Andy's headline is "Democrats do Better Among the Most and Least Educated." Generally, this is true, and this has been true for at least a political generation.
But the most interesting graph to me is the one for Whites 18-29 years. In general, I've been very interested in the young vote, which went 2-to-1 for Obama last November.
Andy's graphs provide more context. Most graphs are humbacked, with Dems doing best at the ends of education spectrum, and the GOP at the middle. For Whites 18-29, the trend is negative. That is, as education increases, so does Obama's vote share. The question these graphs raise for me, will this trend continue as these young voters age, and become a larger part of the electorate.