saavedra77 | More education = More partisanship?

The below grew out of my reply to a post by Orangecone. I thought others might be interested:

Exit polls tracking Bush & Kerry voters' educational backgrounds show something that you may find surprising: the more highly educated voters were, the more likely they were to vote for the candidate who won their state.

Fellow "liberal elitists" please note: this is true of both blue & red states.

In California, for example, Bush did progressively worse, & Kerry better, at each higher level of educational attainment. Bush’s best showing was among the “No High School” cohort (58%), while Kerry did best among the “Post-Grad Study” group (64%). Much the same was true in New York and New Jersey.

But in Ohio it was Bush who did progressively better, & Kerry worse, at each higher level of educational attainment. Kerry's best showing was among those with "No High School" (58%), Bush's among the "Post-Grad Study" group (51%). Missouri and Nevada followed the same pattern.

What's the explanation? We may overestimate the benefits of advanced education for intellectual independence: Recent research at Emory University suggests that more highly-educated voters are both more ideological and more partisan, generally: "the correlation between liberal/conservative self-identification and party affiliation is lowest for high school-educated respondents, higher for those with some college and highest among college graduates.”