In trying to explain Donald Trump’s stunning victory last week, observers have offered numerous explanations. …
One way of testing various explanations against one another is to examine county-level vote returns, where contextual information — education levels, racial composition and so forth — can help sort out statistically which factors are most strongly related to Trump’s support.
My analysis suggests that education was an especially strong predictor of the vote, with race and economic distress — particularly declines in manufacturing — playing important, yet somewhat less influential, roles. CONT.
Loren Collingwood, The Monkey Cage