From the OP’s link, here are the states ranked by numbers of alligator attacks
All of these are red states!
Why do citizens of these states keep voting conservative when it seems to produce the “outcome” of more gator attacks?! 
Or just look at West Virginia, which has a long liberal tradition dating back to its break from Virginia during the Civil War. And looking at pantom’s map, it is not a right-to-work state (in other words, it is union-friendly).
So why does West Virginia hover near the bottom of so many of these quality-of-life rankings?
Conservatives keep getting elected in the South because Southern politicians are Sith Lord-level masters of pandering to the “values” and “traditions” of the populace, while secretly stabbing their constituency in the back in such a cynical and manipulative way that they can’t be caught. That’s really all there is to it.
Blue states aren’t really any “better” (whatever the fuck that really means) than Red States, they’re just not as Machiavellian…which also helps explain the disproportionate power of Southern politics on a national level.
Blue is a calm color.
Red is an angry color.
That explains a lot.
Whatever. Yeah, liberals lose elections because the people who vote conservative are too stupid to see that the people they elect are really just evil people who use them to gain power. Really insightful political analysis. :rolleyes:
Yeah, New Jersey and Illinois politics are so clean. :rolleyes:
Ogre is absolutely right. There is a sad history of Republicans using “values” issues (gay marriage/evolution) and “tradition” (Confederate flag issues) to distract voters from the Republican agenda.
I don’t think too many people voted for Republicans in Georgia hoping the Republicans would limit their right to sue doctors who commit malpractice. That just didn’t come up much on the campaign trail. Heard an awful lot about gay marriage, though.
Sure, they use a lot of values issues. However, if they enact this values agenda, how are they stabbing their constituency in the back? And how, if that is what they are talking about, is this not the “Republican agenda”?
The Republican agenda is pretty broad. It encompasses values voters as well as people like me who vote for the GOP based on economic issues. People who vote for the GOP are not stupid, as so many liberals believe. They vote for the GOP based on the GOP’s championing of their specific issues.
Way to misquote me. Well done.
I never said people are too stupid. In fact, that’s what most of the “Blue-state-rah-rah-rah” crowd is (not very subtly) implying. I’m saying that politicians hit voting Southerners where they’re most sensitive: religion, morals, “family values,” etc. The South is particularly sensitive to this type of manipulation because of our history of poverty, lack of large, homogenizing urban centers, and a sense of having to hang together because, as an old man I once knew put it, “Nothing has ever come out of Washington {D.C.} that hasn’t hurt the Southern man.” Mistrust of the federal government is almost religious here. See also: The Reconstruction.
Oh, and re: Illinois and New Jersey: keep in mind that the Italian Mafia, with all their political scheming and manipulation, started in New Orleans and spread north.
In my experience, Southern Republicans don’t talk much about their economic agenda during campaigns. It’s not that Republican voters as a whole are stupid. It’s that a certain percentage of swing voters are stupid, and Republicans cynically manipulate those voters with “values” and “tradition.”
If you are referring to me, you’re dead wrong. In the back of my mind has been exactly what you have offered as a hypothetical.
However, please point to anything said, subtly or otherwise, in this thread that suggests that voters in red states are stupid. I do think that from an economic standpoint, they seem to vote against their interests, but it doesn’t take a lack of intelligence to do that.
What it does take to do that is a belief that in reality, neither party is going to make a difference for you anyway, so you can go ahead and vote for the values you think are being represented by one party over another.
That’s why it’s crucial to me to underscore that there are key differences between the parties, not only in terms of philosophy, but also in reality. And there is empirical evidence that flies in the face of typical Republican speechifying.
For example: The economy does better under Democratic presidents. More individuals prosper more under Democratic presidents than Republicans, and the richest of the rich do equally well. A divided government is not demonstrably better for spending controls than an all Democratic government, and all Republican governments, when they have occurred, have been horrible. States that are run by a party that does not tend to support a strong central government are net users of resources from that government. And, finally, states that are typically led by conservatives are not yielding positive outcomes on a lot of measures.
I want people to stop shrugging their shoulders and removing themselves from the equation. I want people to recognize that it does goddamn matter who they cast their votes for, and, perhaps even why they choose to cast their votes.
I may indeed be a little sensitive about the widely-held stereotype of the stupid, illiterate Southerner, because 1) I’m a Southerner to the very core, and I’m neither stupid nor illiterate, and 2) I know it to be a pernicious lie.
So forgive me if I get h’et up a little.
Well, there’s just not much politicians can do about gator attacks.
Look, I’m all for voting Democratic. It’s fuzzy logic I hate, and your posts to this thread are full of it.
If you’re fuzzy on any of my logic, I’ll be happy to help you through it.
This from a guy who thinks that cherry picking examples counters the aggregate, and who has at least twice misstated my statements, and who asserted that there was a hypothetical put forth in the OP.
spoke, I apologize for the snark of my last post. I don’t feel I’ve engaged in fuzzy logic, and I responded poorly to your assertion that I have. I’m sure I could have been clearer at some points during the thread.
Your hypothesis is that voting conservative leads to bad “outcomes” in the “red states.” Specifically, you seem to be convinced it causes the social ills we’ve discussed in this thread.
You haven’t produced any evidence to support this hypothesis. All you’ve shown (even if we take for granted your faulty assumption that the so-called “red states” are monolithically conservative) is that there is a statistical correlation between being a “red state” and suffering the social ills we’re discussing. Correlation does not imply causation. (Otherwise, you’re going to have to explain to me how voting conservative causes gator attacks.)
Give specific examples of what conservative policies (that are enacted only in the red states) are causing the specific social ills we’re discussing. It’s your hypothesis. Prove it.
And why you’re at it, explain why West Virginia suffers from those same social ills despite being demonstrably more liberal than the “red states.”
(Hint: What West Virginia has in common with the “red states” is entrenched poverty.)
And on preview: Don’t worry, Hentor, I don’t take any of these debates personally. Hope you don’t either. 
Not that I’m particularly interested in aligning myself with the OP, but in his defense on this one point, I believe what we’re talking about is correlation, not causation. Nobody is making the argument that all these things are true because the people in those states vote Republican.
Not that I endorse the argument, but your understanding of it is fundamentally flawed.
lowbrass, my gator attack post was a parody of the faulty logic I’m fighting. And there are people in this thread making an unjustified leap from correlation to causation.
I’m clearly not doing that. You seem fixated on my use of the word outcome. These things are outcomes of something, are they not? Do you understand that part?
I’ve clearly stated multiple times that we don’t know the direction of the relationship, although we do see a relationship. I’ve also said that there may be mediators, and that poverty is not a bad candidate, but that it still leaves interesting questions.
Try to understand this. Stopping at the point of “correlation is not causation” is not a very thorough understanding of the matter.
There may be no direction to the correlation at all. Using the word “direction” implies one phenomenon is causing the other which simply may not be the case.
Consider the possibility that the phenomena are independent. For example, the conservatism in the South may be a product of the longstanding and deeply-ingrained distrust of authority in Southern culture (combined with strong religious traditions), while the poverty (and the social ills flowing from that poverty) may be the lingering after-effects of slavery and the Civil War.
It is a mistake in general to look at this region as a monolith. Indeed, it would be a mistake to look at individual states as a monolith. The Research Triangle doesn’t have much in common with Western North Carolina, for example.
In the case of West Virginia, lingering poverty is largely attributable to lingering insularity. The state is one of the whitest in the country, relatively hostile to outsiders of all stripes, including foreigners and Americans who aren’t West Virginians, and until recently hostile to business and outside investment.