Educational divide among US voters: a nationwide trend?

This paper offers a novel perspective on how personal education and income influence voting preferences in the United States by estimating a Bayesian multilevel model using electoral data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study. Our findings show that, at the national level, family income is a more significant predictor of vote choice for voters without a bachelor’s degree than for college graduates. However, this pattern is not uniform across states. In richer states, the difference in voting behaviour between college graduates and non-graduates is minimal among the poor, but steadily grows as family income increases. In contrast, in poorer states, this gap remains stable along the income scale.