I started to compile the data maps of the US (shown below) to reinforce my theory that education leads to progressive and Democratic Voting. But after staring at these maps (on education, educational spending, religion, population and more) I found something more interesting in the anamolies than I did in the patterns. Isn't that always the way we learn useful things anyways? Well I have come to a new theory and I think we can study it in time for implementation before the General Election in November. For more Democratic voters, we need to avoid drinking whatever they drink in Wyoming and we should bottle the lower Mississippi River water and spike Republican Koolaid with it. Bear with me below the jump.
This is the map that every one here wants to change. This is the famous purple United States of America. I wanted to see what we might do to make it more blue.
I thought the education map below, might give me the answer and to a some degree, it does. This is the map of the length or our educational years. But there are too many exceptions so I kept looking. See Ohio, Pennsylvania and Kansas for just some of those exceptions.
This is the map of how much we spend on public education. There are far too many discrepancies with our purple map to make much use of this. There is an interesting article associated with this map over at the Atlantic magazine.
This is the map of religious adherents of the country. It counts all religions. Now we are getting some where. This map seems to correlate at least as much as education did. It really seems to correlate well down the center of the US North to South. You might also note that there seems to be some inverse relationship of religious adherence to public educational spending. Check out Alaska, Utah and Georgia - hmmmm.
Could it just be a simple as City Folk versus Country folk? Well the population density map below does seem to match up some but not enough when you start looking real hard, back at the purple map. Certainly Northern Minnesota and the gulf coast of Alabama are exceptions.
And how much light we shed on this subject did not illuminate anything for me either.
Now for the interesting part. Look a the map below which has to do with the Lower Mississippi Watershed and compare it to the purple map.
The Good Anomaly
Something good is happening in the Lower Mississippi Watershed. The area has moderate education spending, low education levels and moderate population, by those factors we should be looking at a red region. But it is so Blue! (It does have low religiousity however.)
The Bad Anomaly
Now take a look at Wyoming, which I will now spell Whyoming. It spends well on education and the people have education and they are of low religious adherence. They should be blue right? Whyoming is a red as the Red, Red Rose of Texas. And Dick Cheney could not have growled at each and every voter there. I am thinking he is outstanding specimen of the poisonous nature of what might be happening there.
Now you may pick up on the anomalous, New Mexico Blueness. I think we have three explanations for this. One is Albuquerque. The second is Bill Richarson. And the third? Well we all know about those aliens don't we? I have always suspected that life forms that were clever enough to visit us would be Democrats too. So that factor probably can not be duplicated before November, so it is not of much use. Although maybe if we throw balloon ride, fundraisers that might work.
So if anyone cares to volunteer to bottle the lower Mississippi River Watershed and sell it as the New Republican Koolaid. I would love to hear from you. On a more serious note, is there an explanation for their blueness? Can we learn from this? PS. If anyone on DKos is from Whyoming, please let me know how you are beating the odds of your anamolous State.