In Meteor Blades' wonderfully written front page story about the tragedy of all the needless deaths in Iraq, he posted this map.
A number of people noticed that the biggest clusters of fatalities were in "blue" states, and bemoaned the demonization of liberals despite all "our" states' fatalities.
But, despite appearances, "blue states" don't have more fatalities than "red states" in any important sense. (explanation below)
Essentially, "blue states" generally have more people than "red states." The big clusters on the fatality map are pretty much in the same places as the big population centers in the country.
Here's a US census map of population by county:
You should be able to see the relationship with the fatality map.
If we're going to talk about which states have the "most" fatalities in Iraq, the relevant question is not how many total deaths, but how many deaths per 100,000 population. (Well, it could be per 10,000 or 100 or whatever, but 100k is standard and makes for easy-to-read numbers.)
Without further ado, then, here's a list of states, from highest fatality rate to lowest. All I did was divide the number of casualties (listed here) by the population of the state (which I found here) and then multiply by 100,000.
I don't know the html to paste this as a pretty table, but you should be able to get the idea. The first "column" is whether the state is red or blue; the next column is just its rank in terms of fatality rate, then the state's name and then the fatality rate. So, Vermont is #1 (I'm sure they're not happy about it) with an Iraq war fatality rate of 2.89 per 100,000.
blue 1 Vermont 2.89
red 2 South Dakota 2.19
red 3 North Dakota 2.04
red 4 Nebraska 1.71
red 5 Alaska 1.66
blue 6 Delaware 1.54
red 7 Louisiana 1.48
red 8 Montana 1.39
red 9 Wyoming 1.37
red 10 Oklahoma 1.32
red 11 Mississippi 1.30
blue 12 Oregon 1.26
red 13 Arkansas 1.26
red 14 Kentucky 1.22
red 15 Arizona 1.21
red 16 Idaho 1.19
red 17 Iowa 1.18
blue 18 New Hampshire 1.15
red 19 New Mexico 1.14
blue 20 Wisconsin 1.14
red 21 Virginia 1.14
red 22 Kansas 1.13
red 23 Ohio 1.13
red 24 Texas 1.12
blue 25 Pennsylvania 1.12
blue 26 Michigan 1.08
red 27 Alabama 1.08
red 28 Tennessee 1.07
red 29 Nevada 1.04
blue 30 Rhode Island 1.02
blue 31 Hawaii 1.02
blue 32 West Virginia 0.99
blue 33 Maine 0.98
blue 34 Maryland 0.96
red 35 Georgia 0.95
red 36 Indiana 0.94
blue 37 South Carolina 0.92
blue 38 Washington 0.89
blue 39 Illinois 0.87
red 40 Missouri 0.86
blue 41 Minnesota 0.84
blue 42 California 0.82
red 43 North Carolina 0.78
red 44 Colorado 0.77
blue 45 New York 0.71
blue 46 Massachusetts 0.70
red 47 Florida 0.69
blue 48 Connecticut 0.66
blue 49 New Jersey 0.57
red 50 Utah 0.57
doesn't count, but blue 51 DC 0.54
What's going on here is that States that are "blue" generally have big cities; big cities tend to mean A) higher population in that state and B) more liberals/progressives/democrats. Bigger populations lead to higher fatality counts, but not higher fatality rates. The higher COUNTS have nothing to do with a state's "blueness" - both blueness and high counts come from a state's population.
We actually see more "blue states" at the bottom of the list than at the top: 21 states, or about 2/5ths of the country are "blue states" but only 1/5th of the top ten states and only 1/4th of the top 25 states are "blue." "Blue states" are about 65% of the bottom 25 states. That doesn't mean folks in these states are less patriotic - just like it wouldn't mean we were more patriotic if we actually had higher casualty rates. I'd guess this has something to do with another thing that goes along with big cities (and so with "blue states") - higher average incomes and more education. This would serve to reduce the number of people going into the military (because many recruits go because they don't see better options for themselves; folks with more money and education have more options).
(I started to gather data to see what factors "predict" a state's rate of Iraq war deaths, but I'm guessing someone has already done that better than I would late on a Friday night - I'd bet it has something to do with average income and education as I said above, something to do with the concentration of poverty, something to do with how many military bases there are in the state, and little if anything to do with the average level of "patriotism" in a state, if such a thing could even be measured reliably.)
There are two take-home messages here. First, a general point: it doesn't make much sense to talk about "red states" versus "blue states" - most "red" and "blue" states are really pretty evenly mixed between folks who tend to vote for Democrats and those who tend to vote for Republicans (not to mention those who don't vote). The real divide is much more rural/urban than red state/blue state.
Second, thinking in terms of "red states" and "blue states" can lead us to all sorts of spurious conclusions. I hope I've dispelled this one.