Religion and education best predict white voters' support for Clinton or Trump

Hillary Clinton speaks at a Detroit church
(Image credit: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

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.

As for income, the pollsters note it was actually "the least predictive of white voter support" of all seven demographic factors analyzed. The voting habits of white voters will be subject to extensive scrutiny in the run-up to Election Day, as overwhelming minority support for Clinton means Trump would rely primarily on white swing voters to win.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.