There has been a wide array of polls of House races released in the last few months with surprisingly strong leads for Democratic challengers, but maybe none so eye-popping as Monmouth’s poll from one month ago of the Virginia’s 10th congressional district. Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock—who sometimes plays a moderate on TV, but isn’t one—has won fairly easily in her last two elections in this suburban/exurban part of the Washington, D.C. suburbs, but this year she’s trailing Democratic state Sen. Jennifer Wexton by double digits: 49 to 39. This solidified her status as possibly this year’s single most vulnerable Republican House incumbent.
If you read deeper into the fine print on the Monmouth poll, there’s an even more startling statistic: Comstock is still leading Wexton 50 to 38 among white voters who haven’t graduated college. The fact that Comstock still has a big lead among these voters isn’t the surprising part; white voters without college degrees have become more or less the Republican Party’s core constituency in the last decade, something that wasn’t true at all as recently as 2000, when there was almost no relationship between a person’s education and what party they voted for.
What is more surprising here is that Comstock is getting demolished, overall, even though she’s still doing typically well among non-college white voters. That’s largely a factor of who lives in her district; the 10th is a district with a fairly large population of people of color (it's 61 percent non-Hispanic white, which is almost exactly the national average), and, of its white majority, many have college degrees or more. In other words, there simply aren't enough non-college white voters in the 10th to keep her competitive anymore. (Or, at least not in a year when her party holds the White House. As you’ve hopefully noticed, candidates in downballot races tend to benefit significantly when they’re in the opposition party; swing voters tend to seek to punish, or at least check and balance, the party in the White House with their votes in congressional and state legislative races, in a phenomenon that political scientists call “thermostatic public opinion.” This is Comstock’s first House election under a Republican White House.)
Which led me to wonder: just how unusual is Virginia’s 10th district in this configuration? I.e. what percentage of its residents are white college grads, what percentage are white non-college—and of its non-white residents, how many of them are college grads as well? This isn’t information that the Census Bureau makes readily available, but its educational attainment tables do provide enough basic information that, with some simple arithmetic, you can calculate that on your own, which I’ve just done. Let’s look in some more detail.
It turns out that of the population 25 years or older in Virginia’s 10th district, 37 percent of the population is white and with a college degree; 28 percent is white but without a college degree. Eighteen percent is non-white and with a college degree; also, 18 percent is non-white but without a college degree. (You might be noticing that 37 + 28 is greater than the 61 percent white figure that I cited above, but keep in mind that educational attainment data is limited to the population 25 years or older, and the non-white population of the 10th is disproportionately younger than the white population, as is the case with almost all of the rest of the country. In other words, a much larger percentage of its non-white residents are under 25 than among its white residents.)
Is that unusual? Yes and no. The 10th has significantly higher percentages of both college+ whites and college+ non-whites than the nation as a whole, but not in a really outlying way; for instance, the 10th ranks 34th nationally, in terms of percentage of whites with college degrees. (Though you might point out that the CDs with even higher levels of college+ whites tend to be significantly whiter than VA-10.) Similarly, it has a significantly lower percentage of non-college whites than the nation as a whole, though there are many CDs with even lower numbers; it ranks #324 in terms of percentage of whites without college degrees. (Though, again, many of those districts with even fewer whites without college degrees are majority-minority districts, without a lot of white residents at all.)
So, in a way, while Virginia’s 10th district isn’t a truly representative slice of “Middle America,” it isn’t a really unusual district in its mix of people; if nothing else, it is pretty representative of what affluent suburbs around the country are like. The fact that the bottom is falling out for Republicans here should cause them some considerable worry about what’s happening in similarly diverse but well-educated suburbs that, until now, have elected Republicans downballot, in places like Orange County, California, or the suburbs of Atlanta or Houston.
Let’s unpack the data a little with some tables. Let’s start with the top CDs for percentage of college-educated white residents. (The national average in this category is 23 percent; as I said before, VA-10 is at 37 percent, putting it at 34th overall.)
| DISTRICT |
% OF COLLEGE+ WHITES |
REP. |
| NY-12 |
54 |
Maloney (D) |
| CO-02 |
49 |
Polis (D)
|
| WA-07 |
48 |
Jayapal (D) |
| CA-33 |
47 |
Lieu (D) |
| NY-10 |
46 |
Nadler (D) |
| MA-05 |
45 |
Clark (D) |
| MO-02 |
43 |
Wagner (R) |
| IL-05 |
43 |
Quigley (D) |
| MA-04 |
43 |
Kennedy (D) |
| VA-08 |
43 |
Beyer (D) |
The one Republican-held district in the top 10 may come as a bit of a surprise: it’s Missouri’s 2nd district, in St. Louis’s suburbs, held by Ann Wagner (which is somewhat competitive this year, but a bit of a sleeper pick). Again, the top 10 districts here tend to have such high numbers in this category because they’re very white on the whole; affluent districts in Orange County or the Atlanta area fall a little short on this list because they’re somewhat more diverse. In fact, if you look a little further down the list to the 11th through 20th slots, you see more of the GOP-held districts that are in serious danger this year: Illinois’s 6th, Minnesota’s 3rd, Georgia’s 6th, Kansas’s 3rd, and New Jersey’s 7th and 11th.
Now let’s look at top CDs for percentage of white residents without college degrees. The national average in this category is 43 percent. (Virginia’s 10th is at only 28 percent, putting it at 324th nationally.)
| DISTRICT |
% OF NON-COLLEGE WHITES |
REP. |
| KY-05 |
85 |
Rogers (R) |
| OH-06 |
80 |
Johnson (R) |
| MO-08 |
78 |
Smith (R) |
| WV-03 |
78 |
Jenkins (R) |
| PA-09 |
77 |
Shuster (R) |
| KY-01 |
76 |
Comer (R) |
| TN-01 |
75 |
Roe (R) |
| IN-06 |
75 |
Messer (R) |
| OH-04 |
74 |
Jordan (R) |
| IL-15 |
74 |
Shimkus (R) |
The districts near the top of this list are, for the most part, found in the Appalachian arc that runs from Pennsylvania down into the southern uplands. It also contains some of the most implacably red strongholds for the Republican Party (though some of these CDs are what you’d call “ancestrally Democratic,” in some cases not falling off until ten years ago). Interestingly, one of these districts, though—West Virginia’s 3rd—is very competitive this year, thanks to it being an open seat and one where we have a strong recruit (Richard Ojeda), as well it having a very recent Democratic history despite going 73 percent for Donald Trump in 2016. There are a few other decent Democratic pickup opportunities, though, if you look a little lower on the list; for instance, Maine’s 2nd district, at #12 on the list.
If you’re looking for a Democratic-held district here, you’d have to keep going down the list a bit more to the #18 slot, where you’ll find Minnesota’s 8th district, where Rick Nolan is retiring but the Democrats still have a reasonably good chance of retaining the seat, thanks largely to a strong union tradition in the area’s mining industries. That and neighboring MN-07 are literally the only two Democratic-held districts in the entire top 50 CDs on this measure. (In fact, if you’re really interested in social science nitty-gritty, I ran a correlation between percentage of non-college whites and the Democratic vote share in each CD in the 2016 election, and the result was -0.82. That’s the strongest relationship I’ve ever seen between any demographic characteristic and political outcomes!)
Now let’s look at top districts on the measure of non-white residents with college degrees. The national average in this category is only 8 percent; a lot of the residents who fit in this category are concentrated into a few metropolitan areas, especially in California and Hawaii. (Virginia’s 10th ranks #46 in this category.)
| DISTRICT |
% OF COLLEGE NON-WHITES |
REP. |
| CA-17 |
43 |
Khanna (D) |
| HI-01 |
28 |
Hanabusa (D) |
| CA-39 |
28 |
Royce (R) |
| CA-15 |
28 |
Swalwell (D) |
| CA-14 |
26 |
Speier (D) |
| CA-27 |
26 |
Chu (D) |
| CA-45 |
25 |
Walters (R) |
| TX-22 |
25 |
Olson (R) |
| CA-18 |
24 |
Eshoo (D) |
| FL-27 |
24 |
Ros-Lehtinen (R) |
You might be surprised to see a number of Republican representatives in this table, but it’s a reflection of the remnants of the fading Republican dominance in two parts of the country: Orange County, and the Cuban-American communities in the Miami area. CA-39 (in northern Orange County) and FL-27 (in Miami) are open seats that are, in all likelihood, Democratic pickups this year. CA-45 (in southern Orange County) is also very competitive; only TX-22 (in Fort Bend County, outside of Houston) isn’t, though even it is a potential sleeper this year and one to watch in future cycles.
Finally, let’s look at the non-college, non-white table. The national average here is 26 percent, so Virginia’s 10th is somewhat close to the national average (at #265).
| REP. |
% OF NON-COLLEGE NON-WHITES |
REP. |
| CA-40 |
86 |
Roybal-Allard (D) |
| NY-15 |
86 |
Serrano (D) |
| CA-44 |
81 |
Barragan (D) |
| TX-29 |
79 |
Green (D) |
| TX-33 |
78 |
Veasey (D) |
| CA-21 |
75 |
Valadao (R) |
| CA-51 |
74 |
Vargas (D) |
| FL-24 |
73 |
Wilson (D) |
| TX-34 |
71 |
Vela (D) |
| CA-35 |
70 |
Torres (D) |
Unsurprisingly, these districts are very consistently Democratic; these districts have large majorities of people of color, who tend to vote reliably for Democrats regardless of whether or not they have college degrees. There’s one glaring exception: California’s 21st district in the Central Valley, which has been a constant thorn in Democrats’ sides all decade, thanks to a combination of poor turnout among the district’s Latino majority, and a strongly conservative white minority who turn out reliably.
States (because they’re more populous and more diverse) don’t produce the same extremes that CDs do
All these tables barely scratch the surface of the amount of data that’s available here; I’ve included a Google Doc that includes the numbers for all congressional districts, but also for states, and for counties and major cities that are large enough to have significant samples under the Census’s 2016 1-year American Community Survey. I encourage you to click through and take a closer look at all the data. (While we at Daily Kos Elections usually use congressional districts as our preferred level of analysis, because they’re all a similar population and because they’re the populations that actually elect the members of the House, we know that, not only do CD boundaries change every decade, but they often aren’t easy for people to conceptualize without a map. “My state” or “my city” is an easier concept for most people to wrap their heads around.)
