Why did Hillary Clinton do relatively well in Johnson County? College diplomas

While she’s not going to be the next president, Hillary Clinton continues to build on her margin in the popular vote. Two weeks after the election, Clinton leads President-elect Donald Trump by 2 million votes.

Each day we learn more about the voter trends that shaped the outcome of the race. The latest story to emerge is that education played a significant role.

At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver analyzed data from counties with 50,000 people or more. He found that Clinton performed well in places where people are more likely to have four-year degrees. In fact, Silver found, she “improved on President Obama’s 2012 performance in 48 of the country’s 50 most-well-educated counties.”

Johnson County’s education level is similar to that of San Francisco and counties with large college towns. Accordingly, it made the list of counties with a Clinton surge. Clinton lost to Trump by 2.7 percentage points, a big improvement over Obama, who four years ago was routed in Johnson County by 17.4 percentage points.

Silver’s analysis indicates that Clinton also outperformed in Obama in Riley and Douglas counties in Kansas and Boone County in Missouri, the respective locations of Kansas State University, the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri.   

Trump, by contrast, did well in the least educated counties. In one diploma-starved county in northeast Ohio that Obama carried easily in ’12, Trump won by 19.0 percentage points — a mighty swing for the candidate who said at one point in the campaign, “I love the poorly educated!“