November 23, 2004
Purple States
This is a really interesting graph my friend Stu Crawford made after reading our lively Fuck The South conversation.
He graphed the percentage of voters in each state who voted for Bush and found that, in the vast majority of states, even the blue ones, it was pretty evenly split between Bush and Kerry.
Stu says: "No matter what state you look at, Bush got about half the vote. All this going on about the conservative states and the liberal states, it looks to me like every state is just about 50:50. There are a couple outlyers, Utah being one with 70% Bush support, and Massachusetts being another with 37%, but other than that it is pretty homogenous. I stuck it into Excel, and the 95% confidence limits are only +/- 2.3% (with an average of 53.3%). It is interesting that the rift in American politics is so evenly spread out and doesn't have more of a geographic component."
So it seems as though there's a lot more work to be done locally to evolve political views, rather than just tromping to warmer climates to pass out Darwin and economics textbooks.