The Disjointed States of America

After the results are counted on November 7, the varied political complexions of the 50 states will play a big role in post-election punditry. But beware of Wednesday-morning quarterbacks whose analysis goes no deeper than a contrast between red-state believers and blue-state pagans.

The assertion that America's red-blue divide is rooted in "moral values" was recently and rightly condemned by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter as an explanation that is "loaded and unfair, and was popularized by lazy-minded journalists." Pundits have latched onto "values" because nothing else seems to explain why so many millions of non-wealthy Americans are so insistent on voting so heavily against their own economic interests.

On this election eve of 2006, let's get a jump on the analysts and examine more closely the deep differences among the states in some of their most important characteristics.

Wages, wilderness, and Wal-Mart

Those post-2004 election maps that showed a blue "United States of Canada" draped over a big red "Jesusland", witty as they were, painted only an incomplete political picture. Leaving aside the usual election-year fascination with scandal, abortion, sexual orientation, and fear of foreigners, I took a more analytical approach, computing the relationships among states' rankings for eight different economic and environmental characteristics. Based on those rankings, I've bent and stretched the red-blue map in some new directions.

I compiled rankings of the 50 states for a range of characteristics, including wages, taxes, and energy costs from a recent Forbes Magazine's survey entitled "The Best States for Business," an environmental policy ("green-capacity") rating by the Resource Renewal Institute, and government data on median income, income inequality, population size, and the number of Wal-Mart Supercenters relative to population. Then I fed the data into a statistical procedure called "principal component analysis" to produce a different kind of US "map":

If you're interested in the details of how I carried out the statistical analyses, with links to the sources of data, see the notes at the end of the article, or for even more detail, visit here.

As you read through the state abbreviations from left to right on this statistical map, you move toward lower wages, lower taxes, cheaper energy, lower median income, cleaner air, and worse environmental policies. As you go from top to bottom, you move toward larger population, greater income inequality and poverty, and a less well educated workforce.

I've colored the states according to their 2004 electoral college vote: red for Bush states, blue for Kerry. The map almost completely separates the higher-business-expense, higher-wage, "greener" blue states from the business-friendly, low-wage, "browner" red ones. It's important to note that the data used to create the map did not include any geographical or partisan political data. The red and blue states differ so strongly in their economic and environmental characteristics that they sorted themselves out.

But look again, because the red-blue separation is more complex than can be conveyed in two primary colors.

States that stand out

On this map, the red-blue sorting happens in only in the left-right dimension. As you move from the top to the bottom of the map -- that is, as you move toward larger populations and a bigger gap between rich and poor -- you encounter both red and blue states all along the way. As a result, the presumably similar red states of Montana (MT) and Texas (TX) end up lying much farther apart than do, say, blue Connecticut (CT) and red Arizona (AZ).

As a campaign season wears on, candidates tend to "run to the center," and, accordingly, the media zero in on swing voters and swing states. But if, as we often hear, we're becoming a more divided nation, then it's worth looking at the states that are leading the way as the nation fractures. To do that, I drew a small circle around the map's center and cut it out, removing 16 states that hover close to the national average in most of the eight rankings. We're left with this map: