Idaho

Today the NY Times ran an article about the concerns of residents in Boise, in light of the increasing political lean to the right of the state.  I'm not sure how long this link will work, but if you want to read it for free, click here. 

It reminded me of my blog post and data visualization on educational attainment and voting patterns (TLDR: The more college-educated people in your county, the more likely you are to vote for Democrats).

So I wondered about Idaho, as it wasn't a state I'd dived into when I did the blogpost.  You can use the link above and play with the interactive visualization if you'd like; you can't break anything. But for the reluctant clickers, here's a summary.  

Here is the overall view in Idaho for 2016, 2020, and 2024.  As you can see, the population is growing and become more conservative.

The overall trend holds, too: In every year shown, the counties with higher educational attainments showed a greater lean towards blue, although no area is more blue than red.  This is unusual, and the only other states where I remember patterns like this are Oklahoma and Indiana.

Here is each individual county broken out and arrayed.  As you can see, there are two blue counties, and both are highly educated in comparison to the rest of the state.  But the size indicates they're small ones.

And finally, income patterns show generally the same trend, although Ada County is both high income and red.

So Idaho mostly follows the national patterns.  And Idaho, like the national patterns, explain (to me, at least) why Democrats are generally much more supportive of education than Republicans are: College-educated citizens are good for the Democrats, but bad for Republicans.