People Living in Blue States generally Make More Money, live around Less Poverty and Less Violent Crime, Less Incarceration

21 comments

1. What patterns stand out to you when analyzing states with differing political leadership?

   How do you think these factors influence broader discussions about socio-economic policies and governance effectiveness?

2. I’m sure there’s a study available somewhere that links crime and incarceration to wealth inequality.

   Also shoutout to both New Mexico and New Hampshire for being delinquent counter examples.

3. You really need to be shielded from challenges to end up so far to the left.

4. I’m not making a political statement myself, but this appears to support what my conservative, red-state friends and colleagues always say about why people vote for Republicans/Trump. They view the Democrats as the party of the wealthy and middle/upper-middle class. And based on this data, that appears to be the case.

   Obviously, while the Democratic party is pretty much full-center at this point, and pro-corporation itself, the GOP’s corporate support and 1% support are both next-level, and its actual support of poor people is pretty bad. But conservatives I know (or GOP loyalists) love, love, love this sort of data as they can claim it explains why red states are so red, and so supportive of the GOP. (You can debate with them if you want, I’m not going there!)

   That aside, what are some other theories for this?

   * Are liberal people more likely to become middle- and upper-middle class?
   * Are upper-middle class people more likely to be liberal?
   * Are liberal people more likely to move to big cities where there are higher-paying jobs?
   * Are people who move to big cities, where there are more high-paying jobs, more likely to become liberal by virtue of living in a big city?

   Any thoughts?

   (I don’t think violent crime should be linked to Democrat or Republican states, that’s linked to poverty, so it’s a step removed, at least. And aside from variable enforcement of drug laws, more incarceration is the result of more violent crime, so at least two steps removed. But I’d be interested in seeing incarceration rates for nonviolent, noneconomic drug crimes in states with modernized drug laws vs. tradiational, strict states.)

5. data presentation is pretty bad IMO.

   A good dataset for inspiring political circle jerking though

6. Me, living in California and seeing homeless people push carts and shout profanity: ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT!?!

7. The #1 blue state in your graph, Maryland, had a moderate Republican governor for the last 8 years. Blue states sometimes have GOP governors and red states sometimes have Democrat governors. Most states are not extreme in party line voting where they only elect one party.

8. Your poverty rate lost outright ignores differences in the cost of living which can be drastically different in different states. Important for a measure that exists to solely guage poverty rate

9. NH is an anomaly partially because it is just the “rich boomer anti-social suburbs” of boston, but as a state. Most large metros in the US have an area like this, it just so happens that boston’s version is in NH and comprises a lot of their population.

10. Excellent! Now if y’all could stop moving to these terrible red states, I’d appreciate it.

11. IE Urban people (blue) have a higher quality of life than rural people (red)

12. The problem you have here is that youre taking states from the south,which have historically always had these issues, and comparing them to northern states which really have always been much better overall.

    To take these issues that have begun at the end of slavery and continued til today and try to blame them on republicans, who have only gotten consistently elected in the south as of about 25 years ago, is just insanely dumb.

    Keep in mind that as late as the 1980’s you could point to a republican run california and a democrat run texas. And they were run by geniune republicans and democrats too. The south was just as poor when they were electing LBJ and Bill Clinton as they are now.

    So how about we bring in republican states from out of the south, like Idaho and Utah, and see if this logic still holds up.

13. A couple suggestions:

    * At the very least, I would add a jitter to the plot so that the points aren’t overlapping.
    * Instead of just doing colors for the categories, I would have 4 box plots, 1 for each category and a total so that you can see the differences in the mean/median between the categories. If you aren’t going to do that, at least allow for a filter for the categories and label the box so interactively you can make a comparison.
    * GDP should be in per capita. Of course, the highest populated states are going to tend to be the highest GDP.
    * Poverty rates aren’t a good measure at all. They do not take into consideration COL.

14. I wonder if conservatives will stop voting for the party that has been keeping them poor for decades.

    (Probably not).

15. They are generally smarter and more educated too. This is why republicans want to defund the DOE. They saw Idiocracy and said “that’s how we will win!”

16. I get using these to make partisan attacks, but it should be clear that trying to correlate party control with state and local outcomes in a cross sectional analysis like this is really bad statistical analysis. It is the worst attempt to show causality from correlation.

    It’s like trying to show cops cause crime by discovering places with more cops have more crime.

    Do wealthy people vote Democratic more or do democrats cause wealth to grow? It’s also further complicated by the fact that the partisan divide is often flipped on income and other socioeconomic factors when you look at different regions, races and gender.

    It’s completely valid to look at the governing policies and track those effects. But I find these aggregate correlations of party and economic indicators completely disingenuous when used to show some causal relationship.

17. This data is neither beautiful nor revealing of the insight it hopes to reveal.

    Let’s take my state very Republican state of Louisiana as an example: very poor, very incarcerated, high crime. The vast majority of the people experiencing all of those unfortunate features to the greatest degree are extremely non-Republican. The Republicans themselves do not live where these things occur in Louisiana, and it is essentially an unfortunate trick of the gerrymandered single-member-district system that our state is so red (we are majority red but certainly not as red as our districts suggest).

    Something one might take away from this data is something along the lines of “Democrats have it easy and Republicans have hard lives” or “Democrats are better at managing things and reap the benefits, while Republicans do not”. For the most part, this is not the case. It is mostly oppressed non-Republicans trapped in majority Republican states who are experiencing each of the items on this list. The problem is that this is how the Republicans want it to be in those states, and they are actively benefiting (relative wealth, protection of their status quo) by keeping the minority non-Republicans oppressed. These Republican states are functioning as they are intending to function under our garbage electoral system*.

    To make an insightful and potentially beautiful visualization, I recommend a scatter plot of two units for each state that serve as proxies for red/blue (can be white/non-white or rural/urban) with each unit’s % votes for Republican (some state-wide office) on the X-axis and the variable of interest on the Y-axis. This will reveal that it is specifically NOT Republicans who are suffering from these factors but rather non-Republicans who suffer more in Republican states than they suffer in non-Republican states.

    *Obviously, there are exceptions (West Virginia, for sure) where the Republicans, themselves, are experiencing all of these things.

18. Generally really like this, but for State GDP – that really needs to be per capita.

19. So the Democrats are the party of the rich now?

20. 1. The income dynamic completely flips around if you adjust by cost of living.

    2. Republican states have higher incarceration rates on purpose. You portray this as a negative, but most Republicans would be proud of being tougher on crime.

21. “live around less poverty” in the title seems incorrect.

    Having your state have a higher rate of poverty doesn’t translate to “people in blue states live around less poverty.” This is a statement about population density and class diversity in a given area, not as a percentage of the state. Several red states notoriously have class segregation via suburbs and more midsize cities.

    The line “People Living in Blue States generally Make More Money, live around Less Poverty” seems like its trying to make a political statement targeted at NIMBY Yuppie liberals, yet the precision of that statement with this data seems off.