Uneducated People Share Simplistic Graphic About Education, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney

Via Don

Townhall

VERBATIM

You may have seen this graphic floating around the internet. I have no clue where it comes from, but wouldn't recommend visiting whatever "happyplace.com" is, which has been watermarked on this version:

Hah! Those dumb conservatives, they all vote for Mitt Romney. And they're dumb. Well, now that we've all confirmed our elitist preconceived biases about conservatives, it's off to the wine bar to celebrate eh?

Not so fast. (Obviously. Why would you be readin this otherwise?) Pretty much every exit poll shows very little correlation between education and electoral outcomes. Here are the graphics that accompany CNN's exit polling on education.

Source: CNN

 

There is only one category here that correlates with level of education: postgraduates. President Obama won those who didn't attend high school, those who didn't attend college, and postgraduates. Here's a news flash: Obama won the election, so he won slightly larger perecentages of everyone. In fact, as education level increases, tendency to vote for President Obama decreases until you get to the postgraduate level. This is largely unsurprising when you consider that one of President Obama's major supporter groups - teachers' unions - consists almost entirely of members who have some sort of postgraduate education.

This sort of infographic is the kind of lazy attempt at snarky humor that actively misinforms people. And it's embarrassing to draw conclusions here - there is nearly a zero level of correlation between formal education and electoral choice.