Trump Support Strongly Correlates With Gluttony, Sloth and Stupidity

Hold onto your milkshakes, folks. Reddit user davedawg2000 constructed a scatter plot on Thursday illustrating a positive correlation between states in which a majority of districts voted for President Donald Trump, and the likelihood that each of those states’ constituents have high BMIs. Of course, anyone who took basic statistics in high school understands that correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, but the data is pretty interesting to look at.

Davedawg2000’s data comes from the Trust for America’s Health, which found in September 2016 that Americans living in Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Alabama have the highest BMIs. People in Colorado, Washington D.C., and Hawaii are the least likely to have high BMIs, by the way. It’s also worth mentioning that politics aren’t likely the cause of obesity — however, obesity is often linked to poverty, which is a problem more typical in red states than blue.

 

Davedawg2000 also used election results data from Wikipedia, and plotted votes on his scatter plot’s y-axis, as compared to body weight on the x-axis. Check out his full scatter plot below.



In the discussion that followed Davedawg’s post on r/dataisbeautiful, other statistics nerds brought up the negative correlation between a state’s number of Trump voters and higher education attainment. That means states with more Trump voters tend to send fewer constituents to college, and many have a hard time getting their people through high school. Of course, like the body weight data, the numbers on “education attainment” come with more than a handful of extenuating circumstances, the first of which is that a college degree doesn’t guarantee the bearer’s intelligence.

Often, a college degree doesn’t mean much other than the graduate having access to scholarships and educational programs which aren’t prevalent in the deep south. Not to mention, the most popular professional fields in the south don’t require degrees. If you’re a kid in Mobile, Alabama whose parents don’t have the income to support you going to college, and you’re planning on a career in machinery or truck driving, a college degree isn’t really a logical goal.

This map shows that high school students in the deep south are far less likely to even take the SAT once - which could be partly because the ACT is regionally more popular, or because students in those states aren't interested in their aptitude re: college admissions.StatCrunch

So, while it's really accurate to conclude that states which voted primarily for Trump are full of stupid people, the data available also does back up the argument that 2016’s red states house a lot more people with high BMIs, and a lot fewer college graduates, than blue states. The numbers alone aren’t vicious, but the social connotations attached to both the state of being overweight, or not having gone to college, muddy the conversation causes great butt hurt among the depraved gluttons who support Trump.

What the Reddit discussion doesn’t bring up is the subsection of liberal Americans who have mobilized against body shaming, and those who consider high body weight part of identity politics. As odd as it seems, given the data above, many liberal Americans are actually fighting for the rights of fat Trump voters to live without prejudice. Animator Stacy Bias’s recent Flying While Fat film speaks to the experience of overweight Americans who occupy spaces designed for thin people.

Then again, despite Trump voters being more likely than non-Trump supporters to be fat, conservative blog Breitbart wrote excitedly in 2016 about a study linking higher body weight to lower IQ. In his blog post titled “Fat People More Likely to be Stupid”, Ben Ker gleefully used a photo of a Lena Dunham to illustrate his point, writing, “the findings will undoubtedly enrage weight loss and fat acceptance campaigners, who have long argued that being overweight is merely a lifestyle choice that should not be stigmatised (sic) as unhealthy.”

All of this is ultimately just anecdotal evidence that red states, though their constituents tend to weight more and tend to exit formal education after high school, paradoxically tend to demonstrate the least amount of empathy toward people whose BMIs are higher. Why, one might ask, is obesity far more prevalent in red states, though body positivity is evidently far more popular among liberal Americans? Who knows.

States Ranked by Average SAT Scores, Adjusted

Rank	State	Average SAT Score, Adjusted	Average New SAT Score, Adjusted	Raw Average SAT Score	Participation Rate
1	Massachusetts	1694	1130	1556	84%
2	Connecticut	1690	1126	1525	88%
3	Minnesota	1660	1107	1786	6%
4	New Jersey	1655	1104	1526	79%
5	Illinois	1652	1101	1802	5%
6	New Hampshire	1651	1101	1566	70%
7	North Dakota	1649	1099	1816	2%
8	Virginia	1648	1099	1530	73%
9	South Dakota	1648	1099	1792	3%
10	Iowa	1648	1098	1794	3%
11	Wisconsin	1644	1096	1782	4%
12	Vermont	1640	1093	1554	63%
13	Colorado	1635	1090	1735	14%
14	Missouri	1633	1089	1771	4%
15	Michigan	1628	1086	1784	4%
16	Kansas	1621	1081	1753	5%
17	Georgia	1620	1080	1445	77%
18	Indiana	1612	1075	1474	71%
19	Florida	1609	1073	1448	72%
20	Nebraska	1604	1070	1745	4%
21	Wyoming	1600	1067	1762	3%
22	Kentucky	1596	1064	1746	5%
23	New York	1593	1062	1468	76%
24	North Carolina	1592	1062	1483	64%
25	Oregon	1587	1058	1544	48%
26	Maryland	1586	1057	1468	78%
27	Washington	1585	1057	1519	63%
28	Idaho	1585	1056	1364	100%
29	South Carolina	1584	1056	1443	65%
30	Hawaii	1584	1056	1460	63%
31	Tennessee	1581	1054	1714	8%
32	California	1579	1053	1504	60%
33	Ohio	1577	1051	1652	15%
34	Arizona	1568	1045	1547	36%
35	Pennsylvania	1567	1044	1481	71%
36	Oklahoma	1565	1043	1697	5%
37	Rhode Island	1563	1042	1480	73%
38	Montana	1558	1039	1637	18%
39	Alaska	1555	1037	1485	54%
40	Mississippi	1552	1035	1714	3%
41	Arkansas	1551	1034	1698	4%
42	Utah	1540	1027	1690	5%
43	Texas	1539	1026	1432	62%
44	Nevada	1526	1017	1458	54%
45	New Mexico	1524	1016	1617	12%
46	Delaware	1522	1015	1359	100%
47	District of Columbia	1518	1012	1309	100%
48	Louisiana	1517	1011	1667	5%
49	Maine	1511	1008	1387	96%
50	Alabama	1496	998	1617	7%
51	West Virginia	1444	963	1522	15%

Each state is listed with its SAT score adjusted for (controlled for) participation rate. Other columns include the rank of the normed SAT score, the new SAT conversion, the raw SAT score, and the participation rate.