From weak state parties to regional differences, we look at why these states are defying demographics
By Louis Jacobson | Governing magazine
It is an ongoing trend that has only accelerated since the 2016 presidential election: Americans are cleaved into two camps shaped not by ideology but demographic factors.
A person’s race, educational attainment and the population density of the place where they live increasingly shapes whether they’ll vote as a Republican or Democrat. “The stark demographic and educational divisions that have come to define American politics were clearly evident in voting preferences in the 2018 congressional elections,” according to the Pew Research Center. “There were wide differences in voting preferences between men and women, whites and nonwhites, as well as people with more and less educational attainment.
In conclusion, Republican candidates perform strongest among white voters without a college degree who live in rural areas. And Democrats, conversely, perform best among minority voters with at least an undergraduate degree who live in or near urban areas.
To better understand how these factors are shaping each state’s political leanings, we used federal data to rank the most rural states to the most urban states, the most white states to the least white and those with the lowest rate of undergraduate degrees to the highest.
Once we compiled these rankings, we averaged the three numerical ratings for each state and used that to create a list that orders them from those that most favor Republicans demographically to those states that most favor the Democrats:
