What makes a blue state blue?
A pretty strong case can be made that what makes a blue state blue is lack of evangelical voters. In New York State, only 6 percent of the population is evangelical. Here’s a scatter plot I made graphing Bush’s approval rating against the perecentage of evangelical voters in each of the 50 states (this figures are from last fall since Survey USA does not do its state-by-state approval polls very often these days).
Scatterplot.jpeg
Residual Standard Error=4.3355
R-Square=0.5342
F-statistic (df=1, 31)=35.5519
p-value=0
Estimate Std.Err t-value Pr(>|t|)
Intercept 27.1094 1.8688 14.5064 0
X 0.3530 0.0592 5.9625 0
oooohh… minitab….
Nice to see that even in states with high percent of evangelicals, Bush still is under 50% approval.
Very interesting - I was taken aback at some of those high outliers (45%! where?) until I realized this was from last Fall.
Gives true meaning to the term “Bible Belt.”
I’ve always thought that it isn’t so much the “bible belt” but down a bit from there and a bit more concentrated, like the “bible diaper.”
[...] We’ve written before about the impact of evangelical voters on the national political scene. In fact, Bush’s approval rating by state correlates almost perfectly with the percentage of evangelical voters by state. In New York State, evangelicals make up only 6 percent of the electorate, which helps explains why this state trends so heavily Democratic. [...]