Rich State, Poor State, Blue State, Red State

Reading E.J. Dionne Jr. in the Washington Post put me on to this paper. Rich State, Poor State, Blue State, Red State: What's the matter with Connecticut? by A. Gelman, B. Shor, J. Bafumi and D. Park, 2005, Dept. of Statistics and Department of Political Science, Columbia University. A link to a pdf of the paper is here.

The paper asks how Democrats do so well in wealthy regions of the country but still are not the party of the rich. The authors conclude that rich people in poor (Red) states are much more likely to vote Republican than poor people in those states. But in rich states (Blue), income has almost no correlation with vote preference.

E.J. Dionne concludes that "The divide in American politics is about more than the ideological distance between the two parties. Right now red-staters and blue-staters live in two different political universes."

The paper is somewhat technical and heavy on statistics, but at least look at Figure 12.