What I said was “Why doesn’t voting conservative yield better outcomes?” I suppose it’s not empirically demonstrated that voting influences outcomes, but I don’t think it’s really that controversial a claim.
And regardless of cause, it is clear that red states don’t have better outcomes than blue. The sun doesn’t go from west to east. The “outcome” is from east to west. Why does it go that way?
On a related note, why are Democratic presidential administrations associated with better economic outcomes?
My guess is this is cyclical, and it is a total wild ass one. There is an overall effect that people vote against an incumbent if the economy blows. Pocketbook effects and all. Now, add on to that the assertion of min ethat the best chance for a Democrat is when there is that economic downturn (other than the encumbency effect), because it motivates a traditional base - the low paid, those with job instability, labor unions fearing layoffs etc. Therefore that creates a situation where a Democrat is more likely to win the White House. Given the cyclical nature of the economy, and the long election campaign, it is plausible that the poor conditions that make a Democrat victory more likely may be self rectifying already by the time that the election happens, or the new President takes office.
As I said, a WAG. I’m not a great believer that Presidents have any great positive impact on the economy. I’ll make my own choices (and base my own pinko nature) on rights based policy choices, where the government absolutely does have a major impact.
But you also have to seperate out whether the voting led to the outcome, or the voting was the result of the situation. Is Mississippi’s placement in the bottom of all states a function of voting Republican more often than not in the last twenty years, or voting consistently Democratic in the preceeding one hundred? Is Bill Clinton having moved Arkansas from 48th to 46th in certain categories while governor a function of him being a miserable governor (still in the bottom 15%), a function of him being a brilliant governor (nearly 5% gains!), or that Arkansas simply doesn’t have much to work with in terms of signficant changes?
Certainly that’s true - but I think the distribution argument still stands. And it still begs the question of whether a state is richer because it is blue, or blue because it is richer. Even if the correlation is there, the causation is what is interesting.
(Apologies for not combining the 2 into one post, but I didn’t see this post till after.)
Up until recently, a lot of these red states had Democratic Governors and the blue states had Republican governors. Look at a state like Idaho, which is one of the most Republican in the country. Up until 1994, it had Democratic governors for 24 years. And while it consistently sent Republican Senators to DC since 1980, it had two Democratic Representatives until 1994. Other states that are now reliably Republican follow a similar pattern, especially in the South where only recently was the state-level dominance of the Democratic party broken.
Likewise, a number of blue states, such as Maryland, had Republican governors. Some, such as Michigan, had a strong Republican presence in both legislative and executive branches until recently.
It’s useless to look at electoral trends of the past couple election cycles and then look at statistics and try to find a correlation. While you might find some correlation, it is essentially meaningless given the diverse nature of most states’ political climate.
I think you’d need to compare income with cost of living to determine which is “better”. If you make $5000 a month and your mortgage payment is $3000, is that better than making $4000 a month with a mortgage payment of $900?
I looked at that site and there isn’t a single mention of Halo anywhere!
Anyway, what about states like New Mexico? Voted for Bush in 2004, Gore in 2000, Clinton in 96 and 92, Bush in 88, Reagan in 84 and 80, Ford in 76, Nixon in 72 and 68, Johnson in 64, Kennedy in 60, Eisenhower in 56 and 52, and Truman in 48. It consistently has a Democratic state legislature, sends a nearly 50:50 delegation (this Congress, 1:2 Democrat:Republican in the House and 1:1 in the Senate), and ossicilates between Democratic and Republican governors.
Not really. Its the same stuff raised in the OP. And it all boils down to the entrenched poverty that’s been a feature of the South for 140 years. The site looks at things like crime, infant mortality rates, life expectancy, lower charitable giving, lower rates of insurance coverage, etc. Those are all things that track closely with poverty.
Actually, I think most of the Blue State folks live in former slave states too! New York was a slave state more than three times longer than sunny Tennessee. And don’t forget most of New England.
I hate this compulsion to label for the purpose of providing evidence as to who is superior.
I’ll see their O.W. Holmes and raise them a Colbert and a Brinkley and an Edward R. Murrow…
According to the NRA, bans on drunk people having guns and limits on purchasing large quantities of handguns at once without a liscence as a gun dealer are not, in fact sensible but are instead outrageous abuses of freedom.
First of all, a license is not required in the United States to own one, that pesky 2nd Amendment being what it is. You do need a license to carry concealed, however. That is a different story altogether.
As for the NRA being against laws proscribing possession while drunk, I’m afraid I’m going to need a cite for that.
“Better” is like beauty, it’s in the eye of the beholder. I care not a flip for many of the things listed in the OP.
You can have the Metropolitan Opera. I prefer the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. I’d rather eat an oyster po’boy at the Flori-Bama Bar than have lunch at 21 in New York. I liked my walk through Ocean Springs, Mississippi much better than my walk down Detroit’s Hastings Street.
Public Square in Cleveland is interesting but not nearly as interesting as the Cajun DJs on the radio station that broadcasts from LaRose, Louisiana. Lake Michigan isn’t bad boating, but it can’t hold a candle to leaving Port Isabel, Texas on the deck of a shrimper at dawn.
I love my Gulf Coast and Southern States, and if they are Red on some loser’s map, who cares? Laissez les bons temps rouler!
I think the country is a whole lot more purple than it is red or blue. My own state of Michigan is an example, generally voting for Democrats for president and senators but sending mostly Republicans to the US Congress and until this year, Republicans had a stranglehold on both houses of the state legislature. You’ve got Detroit and Flint as centers of organized labor, Ann Arbor and East Lansing as great bastions of liberalism, and a whole lot of Republican power in the rest of the state. Whether the state as a whole ranks high or low on the various measures you want to draw up doesn’t seem to correlate very well to lumping the state into the red pot or the blue pot. I think the stats would be more revealing if they were done for urban areas vs rural areas, or within a state take blue counties vs red counties.
The big difference is not Democrat vs Republican, it’s liberal/progressive vs conservative. The south has been conservative for a long time. The republican party. which used to be the party of Lincoln, a strong central govt, etc. made a hard right turn when the party adopted the cynical “southern strategy” in the 60’s.