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May 01, 2004
The most Democratic states
One day, with way too much time on my hands, I decided to get some hard numbers on just who is "red" and "blue". ?The results are almost what would one expect, but there are some surprises. ?Arkansas and Louisiana count as strong Democratic states, while both Ohio and Pennsylvania are solidly Republican.My methodology was simple: take the mean of the most recent presidential and gubernatorial popular votes, and the percentage for each party of the state's federal House and Senate and state assembly and senate delegations, and of statewide elected office-holders other than the governor.
For simplicity, independents were discarded; that is, the percentages were calculated as the total of the votes of the two major parties.
And the results are:
| District of Columbia | 95.3 |
| Massachusetts | 77.8 |
| Rhode Island | 71.7 |
| Hawaii | 71.7 |
| West Virginia | 69.9 |
| Arkansas | 69.4 |
| Maryland | 68.6 |
| California | 67.5 |
| Washington | 63.6 |
| Connecticut | 63.0 |
| New Jersey | 63.0 |
| Vermont | 62.2 |
| Louisiana | 62.0 |
| New York | 61.3 |
| New Mexico | 60.7 |
| Delaware | 60.0 |
| Wisconsin | 58.2 |
| Oregon | 57.6 |
| North Carolina | 55.8 |
| Illinois | 55.4 |
| North Dakota | 53.9 |
| Michigan | 53.8 |
| Maine | 52.1 |
| Georgia | 51.4 |
| Iowa | 49.7 |
| Montana | 47.9 |
| Mississippi | 47.7 |
| Minnesota | 47.5 |
| Florida | 45.5 |
| South Dakota | 45.4 |
| Tennessee | 44.8 |
| Alabama | 43.6 |
| Indiana | 44.2 |
| Missouri | 43.1 |
| Oklahoma | 42.8 |
| Pennsylvania | 42.3 |
| South Carolina | 42.1 |
| Nevada | 41.1 |
| Kentucky | 38.1 |
| Virginia | 37.1 |
| Colorado | 35.4 |
| Alaska | 34.8 |
| Arizona | 34.7 |
| Kansas | 32.5 |
| Nebraska | 31.9 |
| Ohio | 31.9 |
| Texas | 31.9 |
| Wyoming | 30.9 |
| New Hampshire | 29.5 |
| Utah | 28.4 |
| Idaho | 25.1 |
Poor Idaho. They're stuck with two Republican representatives and senators, a Republican governor, two Republican statehouses, and only 1 of 6 state officeholders is Democratic. Their vote for Bush (69!) was the highest in the country.
Democrats really ought to push harder for DC representation in Congress, or better yet, full statehood.
West Virginia is the most Democratic state won by Bush in 2000 (52-46); Pennsylvania is the most Republican one that went to Gore (51-47), although without Nader he might have taken heavily Republican New Hampshire.
For a complete breakdown, you can download a handy spreadsheet of the results here.
Posted by Tyrone at May 1, 2004 05:10 PM