Heightened Demographic Divides

Last week I posted about some of the findings from Alerted States, focusing on the growing educational divide among the states.  In that post, I speculated that the nature of the the 2016 presidential election was likely to contribute to even sharper demographic patterns to political support in the states.

I'll have more to say about this later, but here are a few preliminary findings that confirm that state demographic characteristics were more closely tied to state-level outcomes in 2016 that at anytime in the past several decades:


Education

Correlation=.77 (previous high (2008) =.70)

Immigrant Population

Correlation=.69 (previous high (2012)=.60)

 Religion

Correlation -.79 (previous high (2012)=-.73)

Across the board, these and other demographic and cultural indicators are more closely tied to state outcomes now than at anytime in the past several decades. More importantly, these relationships continue a pattern of increasingly strong connection between state characteristics and state outcomes since the 1992 election.  Again, I'll have more to say about this later.