While conventional wisdom suggests income level is the greatest determining factor in white voters' support for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump (she the elite insider, he the voice of the beleaguered working class — or rich Republicans facing off against poor Democrats) a new analysis from FiveThirtyEight suggests religion and education level are both far more important.
"Roughly speaking," the report summarizes, "a white voter will lean left if she is 'more college than church' and will lean right if she is 'more church than college.'" For those who fall in the middle of each spectrum, the third most predictive factor — whether a person lives in a more urban or rural area — settled the matter, with rural voters preferring Trump and urbanites going with Clinton.
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