Nice quiz with some surprising results for folks who have formed distinct but apparently false impressions over time (like myself) maybe based in part on media emphases or distortions. The facts are what they are. Now we get to see all the entertaining "But, but, but . . ." comments.
The most surprising stat was that the Dems had the better economy, at least in my opinion because the current republican agenda has been all about economy
Depends on what you mean by better economy. Democratic states have higher incomes, but greater inequality and higher unemployment. There aren't as many jobs in red states that offer the crazy $300,000+ salaries that are common at places like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. But that doesn't help people who don't have high market value skills. All in all, some people will do better in blue states while other people will do better in red states.
@QM, I think it's important to note that Republican policy can have just as much of an effect in a 'blue state' as any 'red state' and vice versa. Federal policy influences the whole country and plenty of people vote the opposite of what party their state typically votes for.
@That1 Yes I know, that's why I said 'can have'. For example, there's no doubt that an economic sector like Silicon Valley (which is in a solid blue state) hasn't benefitted from laissez faire capitalism, which is more often espoused by republicans.
Since I don't know much about US politics I solved it asking if the trait in question is more characteristic for an urban or rural population and then go blue for urban cause I know California votes Democrat. Ended up with 13/15.
That's funny, because they're angry at gay people, liberals, trans people, immigrants, women, reproductive rights, equal pay, minorities, colleges, and avocado toast. Doesn't sound very happy to me.
Define ‘happiness’. If access to better higher education, job opportunities and healthcare are used as metrics it’s definitely going to be in favour of the blue states.
Edit: you might want to update an 11 year old study.
You clearly didn't take the Happiness related quizzes posted recently. It's self reported.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest that people's self-described happiness is more related to an individual's outlook on life rather than being tied to work/wealth/healthcare.
I know self-reported data should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, people lie. But, when it comes to happiness? You just have to ask people. I can imagine this now. "How can you be happy? Our data shows you have a low income, eat french fries, and haven't seen a doctor in a year". It imposes the values of the surveyor over the individual. Its deeply insulting if you think about it. If someone told me I'm not happy because of some external factor, I'd tell them where to shove it. Then I'd tell them to read some stoic philosophy. Happiness is a state of mind.
It is hard to compare happiness. I could imagine that a housewife from a patriarchal culture would say she is happy, because she was brought up under the notion that being committed to family equals happiness, regardless of what she really feels. The same man may consider himself happy one day and unhappy the next day, or even the next minute, based on something that happened in his life. As for myself, I would reject the question outright but maybe I'm just being philosophical. Happiness is an ambiguous concept.
I can tell you right now, while I am very thankful for higher education, it did NOT make me happier. That might just be a social sciences thing though…
The misconception I too fell for was that young people lean Democratic, so it must be blue that's younger. AND, it really is true that the Democratic party is younger than the Republican party (per Pew Research Center). However, what's asked in the quiz is whether the blue states themselves are younger, which is not the case partly due to blue states' lower fertility rates.
Surprised myself a bit by getting 15/15. Not surprised to see the COVID and unemployment questions with such low scores. I WAS surprised by the low scores for the younger age and the "moving in" questions. Rural (read "red") states will almost always have higher birth rates than urban (read "blue") states, while I thought it was more common knowledge that states like Texas and Florida are getting flooded with people leaving states like California and NY/NJ.
The age question is the one I got wrong. I wasn't thinking of the birthrates, but more just how many retired folks I know have been moving to the sun belt, which in my mind is more Republican than Democratic. That probably doesn't have the biggest effect on the state's demography overall though.
12/15! Didn't get the unemployment, Covid and average age questions! Really interesting quiz though. Also really interesting to see that roughly 50% (as of right now) have either chosen Republicans or democrats for the happiness question. Only chose Rep because of the two quizzes on migration between states, where blue states were a source of people leaving while red states got a lot of new people.
#3 is going to flip pretty soon. And #12 I don't even think should be on here because the more people you have moving in to the state the more it becomes Democratic.. a state might start leaning Republican but once the economy starts producing decent jobs for educated people Democrats start moving in. Look at Georgia and Texas. Going to be Democratic before long.
By the time demographics ensure Texas and Georgia are decisively Democratic by today's measures, it is likely that a major political shift will occur that will push these states either into swing state territory or Republican strongholds. Though no doubt Texas and Georgia will be more liberal states by then.
But there's a chance they could go Democratic this year. If you look at the states that are solidly Republican... those are not the states that people are moving into. Texas used to be pretty solidly Republican, but the fact that so many people are moving into it is changing the state.
There are so many possibilities. In the future Texas could go blue, but the "left behind" states in the Midwest and Northeast could turn red. Another scenario is that Hispanics and African Americans start to become more and more Republican, which we seem to be witnessing in this election. However it shakes out, a major realignment seems likely, with the Republicans eventually becoming the party of the working classes.
I suppose it will all come down to what politically motivates people [that vote] in the future. If whites become truly racially motivated like minorities today, expect states to vote along racial lines in the future, rather than today's urban-rural divide.
I do think this will happen since what motivates whites to adopt identity politics will become even more pronounced in the future. That is to say, as whites become less and less of a majority, they will feel more and more threatened, compelling them to truly band together to remove said threats, whether real or imagined.
I'd like to say that this is not a new phenomenon; every single anti-immigration act in the past 200 years was because whites in a state felt threatened by immigrants "taking their jobs", and similar sentiment caused Jim Crow laws + lynchings + massacres against blacks.
How the political parties adapt to this future will be interesting, to say the least, but not really my concern.
The distance between the winning and losing percentages for the past seven presidential elections isn't huge.The widest gap was between Obama and McCain in 2008 with 53% to 46%. Bush and Gore were nearly tied in 2000 at around 48% each. It's not as though one party is dominating any election with 70 - 80% of the votes. It doesn't take a lot to swing the vote to the opposing party and I think that's a good thing. States that were solidly Democratic when I was young are now solidly red and vice versa. As QM said, population movements and events can change things. That's why I never liked the labels of Red or Blue states because in many states the numbers of voters that are one party or the other aren't much different, but when a state gets a Red or Blue label it is assumed that everyone in the state is the same, and that just isn't true.
I agree with with everything said, but would like to point out that generally "red state" and "blue state" also represents which party controls the state government, which often has more of an impact on people than federal government. Unrelated note, but it sucks that a state's people can be 48% to 52% while the majority party is in de facto 99% control of the state government.
Well that's what districts are for. The executive is often controlled by the majority party, but people seem increasingly to think of the head of the executive to be an emperor. Their power is vast, but not limited. They're the head of only one of three coequal branches. The representation in the legislature usually better reflects the population of the state. In Illinois, where I live, the House has 118 members: 73 Democrats and 44 Republicans (one seat is currently vacant). Most of Illinois's population is concentrated in and around Chicago, so this 2-to-1 ratio fairly reflects the population of the state.
Agree with everything. Another point worth mentioning is that "blue" and "red" are in and of themselves vague terms. Republicans and Democrats don't identify with one ideology: there are tons of Libertarian Republicans that hate military spending and support the legalization of marijuana (among other things), and there are many religious Democrats who are pro-life and not entirely supportive of gay rights (among other things). This means that red states in the Deep South, like Mississippi, are often very different politically and culturally from red states in the Northwest, like Montana (same with East v West Coast blue states).
I would not call Republicans the party of "the working classes". I wouldn't call the Democrats that either, but at least Democrats are more open to labor unions.
The Republican party certainly seems to be shifting towards populism, but I have seen no indication that they will start trying to cater to workers apart from immigration restriction and tariffs, which are… interesting approaches in my opinion (and which I don't think will be as successful as swaying the populous when the labor crisis inevitably continues and likely worsens after their implementation)
I personally think he is a great president, but I can see how people don't like him. If you are a democrat, he is potentially the worst president for you since World War 2. But there were some pretty horrendous presidents from our past. He's definitely worse than James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Warren Harding or Woodrow Wilson.
even Republican, independent, and libertarian historians rank Trump in the bottom 2-4 presidents of all time. Democratic historians rank him at the bottom. He is objectively horrible. More divisive and unwilling to act than Buchanan, more inept and disinterested in responding to disasters than Pierce, more corrupt and far stupider than Harding, more deserving of impeachment than Johnson. ... not as racist as Wilson, but not too far off, and Wilson was actually a good president in many other ways.
I do bristle at this notion that any disdain for Trump is purely partisan. He has failed in so many respects that it's hard to keep up. And the list of conservatives who detest him is always growing. His supporters brush this aside as "the establishment," which is a convenient way of ignoring the criticisms of people who have devoted their lives to conservative causes. Historians, scientists, international relations experts...pretty much every group with any kind of expertise ranks him as terrible. His supporters seem to think he is some kind of mascot for their causes. But most of the president's day-to-day requires attention to detail and high-order thinking in which Trump has no interest. He's doing an awful lot of harm.
This is based on whether a state went "blue" or "red" (i.e., whether their electoral college votes went to the Democrats or the Republicans) in the 2016 presidential election. Since no states went to the Green party or the Libertarians, it wouldn't be possible without changing the basis of the quiz.
I think a lot of these differences arise from the fact that the big cities are democratic and rural areas are republican. And it's clear that for example there are more homeless people in cities, and a higher median household income. You can't conclude from this quiz that, for example, democrats can't handle the homelessness problem, or democrats make stronger economies.
PenguinTorpedo has a much better explanation of the Covid question than I do. I just remember hearing about how disastrous it was in NYC and (perhaps foolishly) extrapolated that to blue states in general
The only answer that shocked me was the red states are young then the blue states. Everything else was either easy to know or it was something that I can see both party’s states having.
I feel like Americans are born and slapped on the butt with an R or a D and then go home and put in their cribs to watch a mobile of little elephants or donkeys floating above them. Branded for life as part of one of two parties. It's so engrained in all you do and not in a good way always. It seems more and more to be less about being "American" warts and all (and yes there are many warts) than being GOP or Democrat. If you google someone, you know their party affiliation and how they voted or were at least registered to vote. In Canada for example, yes people are passionately for one party over another many times but you aren't labelled as such in your daily life. You wouldn't necessarily know their political affiliation unless you knew them or asked. You couldn't necessarily tell either by where they live. We don't say that people live in a "red province" or whatever. Few places in Canada have been consistently one party over the other every time. Just observations here.
That doesn't apply to me. My mother was Republican and my father Democrat, as were my grandmother and grandfather who lived nearby. It's probably why I consider myself a moderate and I've voted for members of both parties as well as third parties in my voting lifetime.
And I feel like you are making a gross and inaccurate generalization about Americans. It is a particularly tense time here politically, so things are exacerbated. But if you look at Mississippi, maybe the "reddest" state in the Union, 40% of its votes in 2016 went to Hillary Clinton. In Massachusetts, maybe the "bluest" state, 33% of votes went to Trump. And people's allegiances change over time. Many conservatives are voting for Biden this time around. Last time around, many former Democrats (especially in unions) switched to Trump. Moreover, a Republican in Manhattan very likely has different priorities than a Republican in rural Arkansas does. The two parties themselves contain many factions and varying political beliefs. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden differ considerably on many issues. As do Mitt Romney and Donald Trump. Americans can think just fine, thank you. We don't get assigned a letter at birth and never revisit the issue.
To most of us foreigners, the United States looks like a crazy reality show as the news don't show the daily lives of Americans and the last few years have been especially polarizing. So many people here believe that the average American is a racist, gun-wielding, uneducated Trump fan. We don't like to be stereotyped by Americans, but so much of what we "know" about America is stereotypes.
I know there is a spectrum beliefs in terms of Dems and GOP but still states are labelled as "red" or "blue" states and that doesn't change as often as it does in Canada, as an example. My point is that here in Canada we would never label a Province as "red" or "blue" or "orange" because it is not nearly as frequently the same colour two elections in a row. That's really all I meant. You couldn't make this quiz about Canada cause the answers would change every few years more so than they would in America. My assumptions are logical and justifiable based on what we see on American TV and in the media and Americans I know personally and even in Jet Punk quizzes!
And charchar, I don't know whether it is Americans or Canadians that are special in this regard. One of our states in Germany has been loyal to the same party for 50+ years, and others have also been tied to one side for a long time. Commitment to a certain party was very strong until around 20-30 years ago. In the United Kingdom and Italy, there are no states in the same way but regions are known as labour or "red" (a different red than in the US of course). I don't know how it is in other countries.
I observe a similar polarization in Germany, although to a lesser degree because our "Trumpists" hover at around 10% of the vote. But everything tends to be politicized nowadays and the us vs. them attitude is getting stronger.
I think he's trying to say that the answers of the quiz prove that "liberal" states are somehow bad... failing simultaneously to understand the point of the quiz and at the English language.
From a non-american, its so easy to see by looking at the comments here why you will never get along lol. stop making politics your identities and maybe you will shoot and run over each other less
Interesting how the weight of guesses is very much "good = Democrat", except in the singular case of homelessness: 72% of people have expected Democrat-run states to have higher levels of homelessness. Knowing next to nothing about American politics, I wonder why that would be.
The median income question is very deceiving because the Republican party is known to have the richer people but going by the median eliminates the richest which are often republicans and the poorest which are often democrats. Republicans do have a higher average household income. You can look at the income section in this article for more information.
At least in my experience, any demographic data about the United States tends to prefer median income over average income because of the massive income inequality here. While not perfect, it seems to me that it's considered "a more accurate representation" of a demographic to use median income, because that will genuinely be closer to the average person's experience than the mean income will be (as the mean invariably gets superinflated by the existence of millionaires and billionaires).
Looks like this needs an update on the Covid-19 death rates. Where in pre-vaccine days, states with large urban areas, especially in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic got hit especially hard, since late 2020, red states have caught up and surpassed blue states. Using 2020 presidential election results to calculate a state's partisan rate, of the 10 most partisan D states, only New York cracks the top 20 highest Covid-19 death rates. Conversely, of the 10 most partisan R states, 6 are in the top 20. Of the top 10 Covid-19 death rates, the average state leans nearly 14% R, and of the bottom 10 Covid-19 death rates, the lean is +19% D. All of this is seen in a CORREL function pointing to R in Dec 2022.
It's crucial to note that the deaths per capita from COVID-19 statistics are only as of October 2020. Perhaps not everyone took in that information while doing the quiz.
First we computed how "red" or "blue" a state was by looking at the percentage of votes given to each party during the 2016 Presidential election.
Then we used Excel's "correlation" function to correlate each trait with how red or blue a state was.
Correlation returns a value between -1 and 1, with 0 being completely uncorrelated.
Edit: you might want to update an 11 year old study.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest that people's self-described happiness is more related to an individual's outlook on life rather than being tied to work/wealth/healthcare.
I do think this will happen since what motivates whites to adopt identity politics will become even more pronounced in the future. That is to say, as whites become less and less of a majority, they will feel more and more threatened, compelling them to truly band together to remove said threats, whether real or imagined.
I'd like to say that this is not a new phenomenon; every single anti-immigration act in the past 200 years was because whites in a state felt threatened by immigrants "taking their jobs", and similar sentiment caused Jim Crow laws + lynchings + massacres against blacks.
How the political parties adapt to this future will be interesting, to say the least, but not really my concern.
The Republican party certainly seems to be shifting towards populism, but I have seen no indication that they will start trying to cater to workers apart from immigration restriction and tariffs, which are… interesting approaches in my opinion (and which I don't think will be as successful as swaying the populous when the labor crisis inevitably continues and likely worsens after their implementation)
KEEP AMERICA GREAT
Don't quite understand only 15% got the one about average age correctly. Rural Red states have quite high birth rates.
It's crucial to note that the deaths per capita from COVID-19 statistics are only as of October 2020. Perhaps not everyone took in that information while doing the quiz.