Depends. What’s the cost of living in those “low pay” states compared to the “high pay” states?
Anyway, this whole issue is much more complicated than is being presented in this thread. I wasn’t really trying to make any point other than that you can cherry-pick the kind of statistics the OP is using and “prove” pretty much anything you want. One might ask: what’s so magical about states as economic units? Why not cities or counties? Larger states like CA have good economies and bad economies, depending on where you live.
States denote a boundary of laws. Red states generally have statewide laws that are harsher to things like unions while red areas in blue states do not. The question isn’t why these specific facts trend liberal, but why, if they are so skewed, don’t they trend conservative? Let’s not look at any other question then, I’d be curious if you can simply answer this one question of why red states aren’t higher per capita. What is it about this statistic that you find beguiling?
Cities, and some counties, have laws that are more friendly to unions.
I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to pretend to know that, except maybe for Utah as we have already discussed.
Your turn: Why do “Democratic states” have such high unemployment? Corollary: why do they have such low population growth? Corollary the 2nd: Why do they have such a high cost of living?
But those are bound by the laws of the states. And states, as states rights people love to point out, retain some powers that are not expressly conferred to the feds, and can therefore have wildly different laws on the same issue whereas all counties have to follow the state’s rule with few exceptions
I would love for this to be true, but if it were so, people wouldn’t be having such a furor over the recent Michigan right-to-work law. Tell me, are there cities where right-to-work does not apply in a right-to-work state? Because as far as I know, there isn’t.
Because they often refuse to bow to big business’s fleecing of the employees? Take the recent Hostess bankruptcy. Conservatives like to blame the union which refused to take cuts to their pensions and salaries, but neglect to mention that the union just did so a couple years ago AND that Hostess refused to change itself much in the decades since it was founded AND that the executives raided pensions to pay themselves AND they just got a bonus of $1.8 million for, I dunno, leading the company to bankruptcy. If I were working for Hostess, I’d tell them to fuck themselves too
Low population growth is a bad thing? So what? Democrats have less babies, big deal
Tie it into #2. Democratic states have higher costs of living because they are richer. Richer people have less babies. Democratic states also tend to have bigger and more urban areas. Urban couples have less babies than rural couples. So what? You’re asking like that’s a bad thing that we don’t want to overpopulate the earth and have nicer houses
See, now you’re just making stuff up. Are you seriously putting forth the idea that people in Michigan, Maine and Rhode Island are “rich”? I pick them because they are the ones with negative growth rate. FYI, they are 30, 27 and 16, respectively, in the list of income per capita.
If you actually checked to see if it was true, you’d find that, for example, Michigan has a higher birth rate than West Virginia. That’s not because West Virginians are “rich”, btw (they are 49th on the per capita income list). It’s not birth rate, it’s migration. People are leaving those states-- ie, voting with their feet.
n.b.: I am not trying to prove that Democrats are shitty at running states, and that’s why people are leaving. The fact is, this is a multi-dimensionsal issue that is easily distorted by simplistic readings of statistics. It might very well be that some Democrats run states wonderfully and some run them shitty. Same with Republicans. Not to mention that fact that labeling a state Democrat or Republican wrt their economies based on a single year’s presidential election is sociology/political science at it’s worst.
If we took it from a year when republicans won it would be 15/15 of the lowest per capita states. It’s not ambiguous data. Statistically there is an absolute correlation between a state’s poverty and voting republican nationally. You can argue about why that is of course.
People on avg are still making more money, you think it’s preferable to have overall lower income (by a lot) for families or nations so long as more people have a “job”?
There is so much disinformation in this thread, I’ve avoided it, but do let me ask Saint Cad if he thinks these states were doing well under Republican Presidents and, if not, did they then vote for change?
If Saint Cad can answer these questions correctly, my follow-up question to him and other GOP apologists will be: Why does your political position depend on sowing disinformation?
Typical Dem bullship argument. Either no one really understands how great Obama is or Republicans are idiots. If the Dems bothered to think about how people really think the answer is obvious and has nothing to do with political parties.
So you are really suprised that the Americans that are worst off vote for the other guy and those that are best off vote for the incumbant? If McCain had been elected in 2008 we would be having this exact same discussion about how the lowest per capita state incomes are Democrat and untoward_parable would have pointed out the highest per capita states were Republican.
In other words it has nothing to do with Obama/Romney or Dem/Pub but rather that people vote with their pocketbook and if they don’t feel their personal economy is where it should be they will always vote for the other guy a la Bush in 1992.
But I’m sure you’ll trot out the very same “your side does it too, blah blah blah” the next time folks point out that GOP thought is not reality-based.
I think septimus’s point was that the states listed in the OP have tended to have low per capita incomes, and to have voted for Republican candidates for president, for some time. If that were true in 2004, for example (and I don’t know where I’d go aboult looking it up), then your theory that those doing worst in the economy would vote for change is contradicted.
The problem with that is that every election is different. 2004’s election had nothing to do with the economy and was an incumbant vs. a none to exciting challenger. 2008 was two challengers so no matter who they elect it is someone new. So by just looking at 2008 the data is skewed because we had two sets of economic recovery programs to choose from, neither one of which was really comprehensive so either way they picked would be for “change”.
The point I was making was the OP as presented is imperfect because it looks at one election and make a broad conclusion based on that. I came up with a simple counterarguement based on the information presented. I wasn’t presenting my “theory” as a correct one but after having studied and critiqued many poorly written research papers for my master’s I tend to pick up when people make huge sweeping statement based on n=3 or something equally ridiculous. I will point out that I looked at the first four states listed and three of them voted for Romney at a higher percentage than they voted for McCain. Maybe a better metric would be to look at the change in voting i.e. did “poor” states vote more Pubbie than in 2008 and consequently did “rich” states vote more Dem than 2008.
If the OP included the last 4 elections or looked at governors and legislatures over the last decade to classify states as “Republican” it would be a little different. There is also the issue that per capita income is a poor way to look at poverty. septimus uses the term “doing well” I made over $72000/yr in California and was barely making it. I move to Phoenix and supported my family on $56000/yr and was looking to buy a house when the market collapsed and no one could get a mortgage. California probably has the most striking dichotomy with haves and have-nots and most Americans would be priced out of living in the major metropolitan areas. So now having “demonstrated” that a person does better (septimus’ metric) in Arizona rather than California, I will point out that Arizona voted Republican and California voted Republican.
So why don’t we agree to some standard of “doing well” like (per capita income) / (cost of living) and some working definition of a “Republican State” and “Democrat State” before we continue this discussion
There’s so much equivocation here, it’s difficult to see what claim you’re making, if any. Can you identify an election year and economic criteria which you think will show results opposite to that of OP?
Heck, if you come up with a reasonable answer I might do the Googling and number-crunching and agree, if wrong, to make “Septimus is an idiot; Saint Cad a political genius” my signature! (This commitment would have to be reciprocal.)
Calculate the formula (2)*100/(1) for each state - that’s the “adjusted” per capita income.
Sort the states by the number in (3).
Lowest 15 (starting with lowest): I mark them D or R based on presidential vote in 2012
Hawaii - D
Maine - D
Mississippi - R
New York - D
West Virginia - R
Alaska - R
Vermont - D
California - D
Arkansas - R
Rhode Island - D
New Mexico - D
South Dakota - R
Montana - R
Louisiana - R
Idaho - R
R=8 D=7. Pretty even distribution wouldn’t you say?
But without further data or analysis, it has no bearing on Saint Cad’s claim that Mississippi, West Virginia, etc. voted specifically against the incumbent, irrespective of his party, because of their poor economy.
Again, I did not claim that.
I merely presented an alternate hypothesis that met the OP’s rather incomplete data. Mine may not and probably is not a correct hypothesis but then again, since the OP was Republican-bashing you are all too willing to accept their hypothesis on incomplete data and poor metric but you question mine.
Maybe I didn’t make it clear in my post but it is a pet peeve of mine when people make overarching conclusions on poor research as the OP did and my reply was one of many ways to interpreting the data as presented as a counter to the OP’s conclusions viz. no real conclusion can be made on the data. I see that I did not make that clear in my response and so it appears that I made the same mistake the OP did. Sorry for the confusion.
