Which states showed the largest non-college voter gaps in 2024?

Executive Summary

The available reporting does not provide a definitive, state-by-state ranking of which states had the largest non-college voter gaps in 2024; instead, contemporary coverage shows a strong national diploma divide — with non-college voters tilting heavily toward Donald Trump and college-educated voters toward Kamala Harris — and highlights states with low or high educational attainment that are plausibly implicated in that divide ^{[1] [2]}. Multiple outlets flag national exit-poll margins and state educational profiles, but none of the supplied sources release the granular state-level non-college vote gap numbers needed to answer the user’s question definitively ^{[3] [4] [5]}.

1. Why you can’t point to a single state list — the data gap that matters

Contemporary articles described a clear national split between voters with and without college degrees but repeatedly note the absence of comprehensive state-by-state non-college gap tables in their reporting. Exit-poll-focused pieces provide national margins — for example, non-college men favored Trump by roughly 24 points and non-college women favored Harris by about 8 points — but those reports stop short of translating those national differentials into a ranked list of states by gap size ^[1]. Separately, reporting that maps states by educational attainment (Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont most educated; Mississippi, Nevada, Louisiana least educated) offers context for where non-college voters are more numerous, but not how they voted relative to college graduates within each state ^{[2] [4]}. The result is a solid picture of a national diploma divide paired with a missing state-level cross-tabulation needed to identify “largest gaps” with certainty ^[6].

2. What the national exit-poll numbers actually show about the diploma divide

Multiple analyses converge on the core claim that education became a top predictor of vote choice in 2024: college-educated voters leaned more toward Harris while non-college-educated voters leaned more toward Trump, with pronounced intensity among white voters and men ^{[1] [6]}. Exit-poll reporting summarized in these sources indicates that white non-college voters were especially concentrated for Trump (66% to 32% in one account) and that gender amplified the gap ^[1]. Those national margins are robust across the supplied pieces and were reported in November 2024 and revisited in follow-up analyses into 2025, reinforcing the conclusion that a sizeable nationwide non-college advantage for Trump existed even if state-level splits were not enumerated in these accounts ^{[1] [5]}.

3. Where state-level context points but does not prove — educated states vs. less-educated states

State educational profiles in the supplied material identify Massachusetts, Maryland, and Vermont as the most educated states and Mississippi, Nevada, and Louisiana as the least educated, per American Community Survey-based reporting ^{[2] [4]}. These profiles imply that states with lower shares of residents with college degrees likely had larger blocs of non-college voters available to shape election outcomes, and Nevada is singled out as an outlier among battlegrounds for low attainment ^{[3] [2]}. However, a higher share of non-college residents does not, by itself, equal a larger non-college voter gap; a state could have many non-college voters but small relative preference differences between education groups. The supplied sources make that conceptual distinction but do not provide the cross-tabulated vote-by-education-by-state tables needed to move from plausible inference to empirical ranking ^{[4] [3]}.

4. Competing narratives in the coverage and their implications

Reporting frames the diploma divide in two complementary ways: as a national electoral force explaining 2024 outcomes and as a structural demographic fact in certain states that colors local politics. Some pieces emphasize a broad, party-reshaping trend in which Democrats struggled with non-college white working-class voters, while others highlight state educational maps to suggest where that trend would be most consequential ^{[6] [2]}. These emphases reflect different journalistic aims: national exit-poll synthesis versus demographic mapping. Both are factual within their scope, but taken together they underscore that the question “which states showed the largest non-college gaps?” cannot be answered with the supplied materials without additional state-level cross-tabs or public datasets ^{[1] [4]}.

5. What additional data would resolve the question — and where to look next

To produce a definitive ranked list of states by non-college voter gap, one needs state-level exit-poll cross-tabs or aggregated precinct-level returns matched to educational attainment measures; the supplied sources do not include those cross-tabulations ^{[5] [3]}. The current reporting narrows the field of plausible candidates — states with low educational attainment like Mississippi, Nevada, and Louisiana and battlegrounds with demographic quirks — but that remains inferential rather than conclusive ^{[2] [3]}. Absent those state-level figures in the provided materials, the responsible conclusion is that the national diploma divide is strongly documented while the specific state-by-state gap ranking remains unproven by these sources ^{[1] [4]}.