Higher education has increasingly become a marker of partisan identification. Among white voters especially, a college degree has come to be seen as predictive of voting patterns. And counties with flagship institutions in them have increasingly swung toward Democrats in presidential elections.
What did the presence of a college in a county say about how that county voted in 2020?
To answer that question, we zeroed in on Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — the five states that moved from Donald J. Trump in 2016 to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, and looked at what happened in the counties that had colleges in them. Here’s what we found.
Trump won most of these counties.
In those five states, 136 counties include four-year public or private nonprofit colleges that have at least 100 students and, in normal years, in-person classes. Trump carried 87 of them, while Biden took 49, according to unofficial results.
But those numbers tell only part of the story. The margins in them weren’t particularly close; Trump claimed 61 percent of the vote in the counties with colleges that he won. Biden won the same share of the vote in the counties in which he prevailed.
But Biden’s counties were more populous: They produced 12.7 million total votes, more than double the 5.4 million votes that came from the counties with colleges in them that Trump won. Biden’s counties, while smaller in number, also had more colleges in them: 191 to the 138 in Trump’s counties.
Biden flipped just five counties.
Five of the counties with colleges in them flipped from President Trump in 2016 to President-elect Biden in 2020.
Two of the counties are in Pennsylvania: Northampton, home to institutions that include Lehigh University and Lafayette College; and Erie, where Gannon University and Edinboro University are located. Saginaw County, in Michigan, has Saginaw Valley State University, among others. And the last county that flipped to Biden was Maricopa County — Arizona’s largest and home to multiple campuses of Arizona State University and others.
Most of the counties trended blue.
Even in the counties with colleges that didn’t flip, most of them voted more blue than in 2016. Seventy percent of them saw an increased share of votes go to the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
The following counties with colleges in them showed the largest changes in either reducing the margin of the Republican victory in 2016 or increasing the margin of a Democratic win that year.
The biggest increases were in Georgia.
Georgia had the three college counties with the largest increases in Democratic vote margins in 2020. Gwinnett County, home to campuses that include Georgia Gwinnett College, went up 12.4 percentage points. Cobb County, where Kennesaw State University and Life University are located, was up 12.2 percentage points. And Cherokee County, home of Reinhardt University, went up 10.2 percentage points.