I was hoping the sources would be nice to me and line up all the murder rates by state on the same page, but instead they had each state separately, which meant connecting to 51 web pages.
Here are some data:
6.2 unweighted average murder rate (per 100,000 people in 1998) for Bush states
4.5 unweighted average murder rate (per 100k) for Gore states
6.7 unweighted average murder rate for Gore states and the District of Columbia
I included the second datum because DC kind of throws things off; its murder rate per 100k was 49.7; the national rate was 6.3 (I hesitate to say “national average” because, when dealing with rates, a national rate is the same thing as a national weighted average; someone might think I meant a national unweighted average, which I don’t).
Okay, those data are a little weird. I just took the state “murders per 100k” data and averaged them. I didn’t feel like weighting them properly, because that would mean gathering all the population data and multiplying back. I did do a crude weighted average; since the number of electors for each state was already on my spreadsheet, I just subtracted 2 to get the number of reps, which is roughly proportional to population. The caveat: the data are comparable to one another, but no necessarily externally valid:
6.8 weighted average murder rate for Bush states
5.5 weighted average murder rate (per 100k) for Gore states
5.7 weighted average murder rate (per 100k) for Gore states and the District of Columbia
I don’t expect this is going to turn anybody around on the OP, but these data are very interesting. Southerly states have freakishly high murder rates (and by “southerly” I mean, “states lying to the south”, not “states that were once part of the Confederacy”). The South and most of the Southwest went for Bush, which is why his figures are so high, despite Gore’s victory in some very heavily-weighted states with middling-high murder rates (California, Illinois, Michigan). Anyway, I’m thinking of starting a GD thread on the “why are murder rates so high in the South”. Thanks for the link, Wendell.
Trivia:
The Gore state with the highest murder rate was New Mexico. Picture that on a map.
Montana has almost six times the murder rate of neighboring North Dakota. (Not of electoral interest; they were both Bush states, but I mean … ???)
Most murderous states in the nation, in 1998: Louisiana (12.8 per 100k), followed by Mississippi.