Blue States Make, Red states Take

[courseofhistory]

Blue Stataes Make, Red States Take

Oh the irony! I guess the blue states could tell the red states they didn't build that!

We’ve all heard it: “Dress for the job you want, not the one you have.” I often wonder if the same logic applies to electoral politics. Though conflating “the political” with “the sartorial” isn’t at all my intention, I cannot help but believe that we vote for the lives we want, not the ones we have. Politics, broadly understood, helps to bridge the chasm between the immediate and the aspirational, to negotiate the oscillation of our material needs and our magical desires. To this end, I think there is sufficient evidence to argue that politics is what we do when metaphysics fails, what we do when transhistorical categories of supposed universality become unlaced.

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Traditional scholars in the field of political science often suggest that our unobstructed self interest (premised on rational choice theory) tends to produce policy preferences and electoral outcomes largely reflective of our material interests. Regrettably, however, according to a 2007 report published by the Tax Foundation entitled “Federal Spending Received Per Dollar Paid by State,” U.S. states that rely most heavily on federal subsidies for public programs routinely elect politicians who are determined to excoriate such funding sources. The articulation of policy preferences and, indeed, the creation and maintenance of a deeply democratic society are co-premised on free and equal access to reliable information, but even a cursory exegesis of the Tax Foundation data compels one to conclude that the particular states most dependent on aid from the federal government are the very same states whose residents voted overwhelmingly for John McCain in 2008. How could this be?

According to the data, only 10 “blue states” were net recipients of federal subsidies, as opposed to 22 “red states.” Only three “red states,”—Texas, Florida, and Nevada—were net payers of federal taxes, as opposed to 14 “blue states.” And only one “blue state,”—Rhode Island—paid as much as it was remitted. In 2008, eight of the top ten net recipient states voted for John McCain over Barack Obama by an average margin of 10.2 percentage points. Please see below: