People talk up a storm about liberalism vs. conservatism. Blah, blah, I say the proof is in the pudding. I did some research today on using the census bureau website and several other sites that collect national economic/population data. Lets see how the data stacks up in real life when a state has been run in the recent past by predominantly liberal or conservative ideals. I didn't count the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico in the totals.

Education
Of the 10 states with the best education score, 8 are liberal.
Of the 10 states with the worst education score, 8 are conservative.

Economy
Of the 10 poorest states economically, all 10 are traditionally conservative.
Of the 25 poorest states economically, 18 are traditionally conservative.
Of the 25 richest states economically, 15 are liberal.
Of the top 10 states with HIGHEST unemployment rates, all 10 are conservative.
Of the top 10 states for highest personal income, 8 of 10 are liberal.

Crime
Of the 10 most murderous states, 8 are traditionally conservative.
Of the top firearm deaths states, 24 of 25 are traditionally conservative.

Teen Birth Rate
Of the states with the HIGHEST teen birth rate, 9 of 10 are conservative.
Additionally, 21 of the 25 highest are conservative.
(so much for the religiously motivated abstinence only policy)

Health
Of the top ten healthiest states, 7 of 10 are liberal.


I'm sure some people will have all manner of insulting, rage filled remarks to this, but those are the numbers, like it or not. Where would you want to live?

You'll have to do better than that. You have not explained your criteria. By "conservative state", do you mean "red state"? What facts do you use to judge whether a state is "poor"? "Healthy"?

__________________
Do you know what it's like to fall in the mud and get kicked... in the head... with an iron boot? Of course you don't, no one does. It never happens. It's a dumb question... skip it.

Mmm yeah, also you'd need to link to the means of educational scoring, and it'd be better if you could include rankings of all the in betweens- for all I know the 30 states in between are all conservative, and far closer to the top 10 in quality than to the bottom 10. Ought to show your data- which sites you used for instance.

education and dictionaries are a liberal conspiracy.

__________________
https://www.voteforchange.com/

You are right, I should have provided more data, but.....I'm not going to. It was long, complicated, and would take me several pages to type it all out.

I can provide quick generalities. I used information going back to Regan's first term in 1980 for voting history. A state qualifying as historically liberal/conservative was a very complicated formula involving state legislature history/governorships/and county by county results for senate/house of rep. history.

Of course you can argue to calculate differently, and say I'm biased. However I set my rules for definitions before I started so what I came up with was not adjusted to make it come out the way I wanted.

I don't really expect anyone to look at this and have a revelation, but I thought it was interesting for my own knowledge when I did it and I'm satisfied it was a pretty accurate result.

If anybody wants to go do this themselves the information is out there and all public and accessible.

You shouldn't have tried to bite off so much with one post.

Take "poor" for instance. If you go strictly by the census and their definition of the poverty level, you fail to take into account cost of living. Cost of living can be somewhat correlated with median income. Simply using the number of people with incomes below the poverty level can be quite misleading. You can imagine that in a high cost of living area, the poverty level should be much higher. You'd also have to correlate the numbers of illegals and other immigrants who don't speak English. There are many things that contribute to the poverty level. Standards of living might be a better criteria to use in making your case.

__________________
Do you know what it's like to fall in the mud and get kicked... in the head... with an iron boot? Of course you don't, no one does. It never happens. It's a dumb question... skip it.

If you don't list your sources and methodology the information carries no weight and your post is basically worthless. Don't underestimate our intelligence and post your methodology if you really want us to consider your post. I find it hard to believe that you did all this on paper and did not do or save anything on the computer. Copy and paste is really easy to do.

Well, you are probably right that I shouldn't have posted it without being willing to type out all my methodology, so, meh, take it for whatever worth it has to you then, if that's nothing, oh well.

not that it's not interesting - as an independent the statistics are very interesting; I just wanted to highlight the importance of how statistics are produced; sorry if I came across a little aggressive on it - people usually sidestep the issue because they are only interested in the results and not the process (as usual)