JANUARY 10, 2017
A new study on racial integration in the United States that ranked all states and the District of Columbia based on “16 key indicators of equality and integration” shows seven out of 10 of the most integrated voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
Financial advice website WalletHub published “
2017’s States with the Most Racial Progress” to determine “the most racially integrated and progressive states” based on employment and wealth, education and civic engagement, and health.
“We evaluated those dimensions using 16 relevant metrics …,” according to the site’s
methodology. “Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with 100 representing the highest level of racial integration and progress.”
The top 10 states on WalletHub’s “racial integration ranking” – from first to 10th – include: Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Texas, Delaware, Nevada, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Montana and Tennessee. Results of the 2016 election show all of those states with the exception of Hawaii, Delaware and Nevada, voted to elect Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States.
In other words, residents in the most racially integrated states in the U.S. – according to WalletHub – didn’t seem to buy into the mainstream media’s portrayal of Trump as a racist, and opted for The Donald over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – who was championed as the equality candidate.
That trend seems to hold in many of the study’s individual metrics, including median annual income, the labor force participation rate, unemployment, residents with a bachelor’s degree, and standardized student test scores, the data shows.
Washington, D.C. ranked dead last.
The findings provide an interesting context to comments made by Clinton during the 2016 campaign that labeled half of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.”
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton told her backers at a New York City fundraiser in September, according to a transcript published by the
LA Times.
“The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it.”
The WalletHub’s data also showed more Trump supporting states among the top 10 with the highest “racial progress ranking,” which included Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, Mississippi, Wyoming, New Mexico, North Dakota, Texas, North Carolina and Louisiana.
The racial progress ranking “measured progress by subtracting the values attributed to whites and blacks for a given metric, using the oldest available data and the most recent,” according to the methodology.
Election results show seven out of the top 10 in the racial progress ranking backed Trump: Georgia, Mississippi, Wyoming, North Dakota, Texas, North Carolina, and Louisiana.
