By now, you’ve heard about the great American divide that ushered Donald Trump into office. It’s probably been pitched as a matter of money and wealth— prosperous city dwellers against the rural poor, or the white working class versus everyone else.

But that’s the wrong place to look. Education mattered more than anything else, it appears, even when controlling for economic factors.

States submitting their final election returns have made it possible to dig deeper into local ballots, combining Census demographics and county-level turnout to make conclusions with statistical heft. The chart below tracks 15 demographic factors and the relative strength they held in this election, as modeled through linear regression (and controlling for total votes and Mitt Romney’s 2012 turnout, which strips away some predictable partisan patterns):

Here is Question One on this year’s Constitutional Law exam.

The “electoral college” is

1. a terrible idea that has gone wrong repeatedly and now bids fair to destroy the Republic.

2. a wise creation of all-wise “Founding Fathers” who foresaw precisely this moment and set up the “college” to protect the People from themselves.

3. Both of the above, even though that makes no sense at all.

4. WTF? How did we get here?

At least from now until December 19, when the electors will meet in the state capitals to vote, we are likely to hear a good deal about answer 3 from Democrats and supporters of Hillary Clinton. (In the spirit of disclosure, I am both.)

My Atlantic colleague Peter Beinart explains that the choice of Donald Trump is “the kind of democratic catastrophe that the Constitution, and the Electoral College in particular, were in part designed to prevent.” In Time, author Michael Signer tells us that “the Electoral College was primarily designed to stop a demagogue—a tyrannical mass leader who preys on our prejudices—from becoming President.” Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig argues in The Washington Post that “the framers created a safety valve  . . . . Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people’s choice.”

To study and believe in a constitution—to give political allegiance to it as a nation’s highest law—requires a commitment to procedure. If the right rules are followed, if the procedures are fair, then the result, however regrettable, must be legitimate. I’ve been teaching and studying the U.S. Constitution for a quarter-century, and events have sometimes tugged at my procedural head and my substantive heart in different directions.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton, for example, struck me as a ludicrous comic-opera coup d’etat—but the House and Senate followed constitutional forms scrupulously, and had Clinton been removed he would have had to go. George Bush’s war in Iraq seemed at best reckless and at worst insane—but Bush obtained approval from Congress, as required by Article I, and the war became the nation’s war, fought in some way with my consent as a citizen. People put bumper stickers on their cars—pictures of Bush saying, “He’s not my president.” I thought that was untrue to the American system.

You learn a lot about America on its country roads.

My education came under the tutelage of my father, a man who taught me his love for driving through the South. There’s a beauty in the neat tobacco rows on Highway 64 and the tall, quiet sentinel trees on 87. With mouths full of sunflower seeds, my daddy would quiz me on each plant, animal, and landmark we passed, and I picked up both his habits of driving and cataloguing the things that made us Southern, black, and whole.

But things ain’t always beautiful, and I learned those too. One hot summer afternoon, taking the 74 east from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Elizabethtown in my daddy’s black Toyota truck, a man ran us off the road. We skidded on the dirt shoulder as the man sped on past, his Confederate battle flag license plate a final insult to our situation. The bile rose in my throat, and the hot anger and shame at the symbol made my skin prickle. Here was a man who could just be a jerk having a bad day, but whose choice of a single symbol suddenly made that bad day personal. My dad just cussed a little bit, put another handful of sunflower seeds in his mouth, and continued on our way down that road.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth.

Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way for most people. The majority of marriages fail, either ending in divorce and separation or devolving into bitterness and dysfunction. Of all the people who get married, only three in ten remain in healthy, happy marriages, as psychologist Ty Tashiro points out in his book The Science of Happily Ever After, which was published earlier this year.

Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common?

Language is the hallmark of humanity—it allows us to form deep relationships and complex societies. But we also use it when we’re all alone; it shapes even our silent relationships with ourselves. In his book, The Voices Within, Charles Fernyhough gives a historical overview of “inner speech”—the more scientific term for “talking to yourself in your head.”

Fernyhough, a professor at Durham University in the U.K., says that inner speech develops alongside social speech. This idea was pioneered by Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist who studied children in the 1920s and noted that when they learned to talk to other humans, they also learned how to talk to themselves, first out loud, and eventually, in their heads.

“I don't have one. They're kind of expensive to use,” John Sylvan told me frankly, of Keurig K-Cups, the single-serve brewing pods that have fundamentally changed the coffee experience in recent years. “Plus it’s not like drip coffee is tough to make.” Which would seem like a pretty banal sentiment, were Sylvan not the inventor of the K-Cup.

Almost one in three American homes now has a pod-based coffee machine, even though Sylvan never imagined they would be used outside of offices. Last year K-Cups accounted for most of Keurig Green Mountain’s $4.7 billion in revenue—more than five times what the company made five years prior. So even though he gets treated like a minor celebrity when he tells people he founded Keurig, Sylvan has some regrets about selling his share of the company in 1997 for $50,000. But that’s not what really upsets him.

1. Youngstown, U.S.A.

The end of work is still just a futuristic concept for most of the United States, but it is something like a moment in history for Youngstown, Ohio, one its residents can cite with precision: September 19, 1977.

For much of the 20th century, Youngstown’s steel mills delivered such great prosperity that the city was a model of the American dream, boasting a median income and a homeownership rate that were among the nation’s highest. But as manufacturing shifted abroad after World War  II, Youngstown steel suffered, and on that gray September afternoon in 1977, Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced the shuttering of its Campbell Works mill. Within five years, the city lost 50,000 jobs and $1.3 billion in manufacturing wages. The effect was so severe that a term was coined to describe the fallout: regional depression.

Why did Hillary Clinton lose last week’s presidential election? The candidate herself believes James Comey, the FBI director who notified Congress in an October 28 letter that he was reopening the inquiry into her private emails, was to blame. Her campaign, meanwhile, has cited “a host of uncontrollable headwinds,” asserting that her team did all they could in an unforeseeably difficult environment.

Many Democrats, however, are less forgiving of the campaign and its strategy. It may be true that the Comey letter shaved a crucial few points off Clinton’s vote in the home stretch. But critics believe a better campaign would have left her less exposed to a last-minute surprise. If not for a series of miscalculations, these critics contend, the Comey letter wouldn’t have had the impact it did—and she might be president-elect today.