The Trouble with Republican States

States’ rights make a comeback as Republicans rush to defy Washington (7/29/2023)

...blue-state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red-state counterparts Paul Krugman (12/2/2019)

It's not a good idea to live in a red State

While rural Americans often tell reporters that they feel neglected and ignored by big-city coastal elites, the people preventing them from getting health care aren't in New York or D.C., they’re in their own state capitals. And these state politicians hold power in large part thanks to the strong Republican leaning of rural voters. Self-Inflicted Medical Misery, Red America’s homemade rural health crisis. (6/24/2019)
Virtually every state government, according to a recent study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, kowtows to business and the wealthy, under represents citizens of lesser means, lacks transparency, and does a poor job of enforcing ethics laws, The promotion of states’ rights is not an atavistic racial reflex for the insiders, that is to say, but a cold-eyed way to secure minority rule." from Democracy in Chains, The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America: Nancy MacLean (2017)

Best and Worst States to Work in America 2022

American policy is splitting, state by state, into two blocs (9/3/2022) The Economist

State Legislatures Are Torching Democracy (8/6/2022) Jane Mayer in the New Yorker

Americans with a bachelor's degree or higher in each U.S. state

Firearm Mortality by State - See if you can guess which States are Republican.

States With Abortion Bans Are Among Least Supportive for Mothers and Children (7/28/2022)

A National Survey of Far-Right Membership in State Legislatures

‘Free to do as you are told’: Florida Republicans advance wave of draconian bills (1/31/2022)

States ranked by COVID-19 death rates: (12/10/2021)

What We See in the Shameful Trends on U.S. Maternal Health (11/21/2021) NYT

Concentration of Covid Cases in Red States (9/28/2021)

Watch What’s Happening in Red States (6/2021) The Atlantic

States That Still Impose Sales Taxes on Groceries (4/1/2020)

America is full of ‘democracy deserts’. Wisconsin rivals Congo on some metrics (8/13/2021) David Daley and Gaby Goldstein

Stateline

There is no question in my mind anymore that the Republican Party has reconfigured itself as a Confederate party. Not because it is so largely white, though it is. Not because it is largely Southern, though it is that, too. And not because it fights so hard for vestigial accoutrements like the Confederate battle flag. The Republican Party is a Confederate party, I think, because that is its view of what the government of the United States should be. It is written quite clearly in the party's platform that the Republicans adopted last week in Tampa: "The Republican party... stands for the rights of individuals, families, faith communities. institutions — and of the States which are their instruments of self-government." Charles Pierce: Esquire Magazine 9/2012

States rights propel a beggar thy neighbor, race to the bottom: competing for lowest taxes, worst labor laws, most stingy social programs, lax environment regulation, corporate welfare, keep most people down. Wealth disparities soar with toxic side effects, kill democracy, but the GOP doesn’t talk about that. It is also a dog-whistle for racism.

GOP is the party of States rights, strongest in the former Confederacy, where armed, white, Christian nationalism seems ascendant. On 1/6 followers even carried the confederate flag into the capital.

Food Insecurity

Republican States are poorer, more polluted, have stricter voting rights, looser gun laws, harsher abortion regulation, poorer healthcare, worse virus response, lower education levels, higher religiosity, more dangerous infrastructure, and altogether worse right-wing government. They don't like government which is why they are bad at it.

Here is a map of poverty in the U.S. See if you can guess which States are republican.
Click here to see the map.

States With Strict Abortion Laws

Competition between States has been an important tool to fund corporations at the expense of taxpayers. (Think of the rush to sweeten the deal for Amazon.) Tax cuts or even no taxes encourage affluent to relocate, tax breaks for corporations are motivating, outright bribery is frequent, and destroying worker unions (they tend to be right-to-work States) keeps labor costs down. The net effect is to assist in the great Niagra up economy. See the Republican Scam. This is a bi-partisan activity, but Republican States are particularly aggressive at it, monopolies thrive so there is little competition and not a free market.

Republicans insist on tax cuts, mostly for themselves, leading to in austerity in States where they are elected.The result is higher education has become expensive, services such as water delivery are not maintained, infrastructure goes unrepaired, most people are being ripped off.

Government is only as good as the decisions it makes, since right wing government tends to a small number of decision makers, right wing government is almost never good. Republicans have become a far right party, they have become a danger to the republic by mounting a fascist insurrection, which continues with efforts to change voting laws. Their followers do not vote in their own self interest ... unless they are wealthy party loyalists.

As Disney found out in Florida, the GOP State will fight back if the corporation disagrees. Texas doesn't tolerate reimbursement of expenses for women to get an abortion.

Voting Republican means not voting in your own self interest.

Poor Conservatives

Links

Right Wing

Republicans

Red States

Social Contract

Healthcare

Pandemic

Abortion

Guns

Agenda

Death Penalty

Education

Race

Immigration

Religion

Sex

Labor

Poverty

Taxes

Here's what to expect when Republicans win.

Firearm Mortality By State (CDC)

Stand Your Ground

State Republicans

Food Insecurity by State

Future Now

Stop Republican Governors

ALEC

Red-Blue State Comparison

How Corrupt Is Your State ?

Who Pays

Health System Scorecard

Indiana Schools (Mike Pence) (12/22/2016)

Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy

97% of the 100 poorest counties are in Red State America

SIX: State Innovation Exchange

Which States Have State Budget Deficits or Shortfalls? That Question is Harder to Answer than You’d Think (2/23/2016)

Hawaii

Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

In early February, a Brennan Center for Justice report detailed: "Thus far this year, thirty-three states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 bills to restrict voting access. These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) slash voter registration opportunities; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges. These bills are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election." On Feb. 24, the center updated its account to reveal that "as of February 19, 2021, state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled, or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states." Voter Suppression Is Grand Larceny

Firearm Mortality By State (CDC)

Republicans, where they govern, have a {Koch, ALEC] right-wing agenda that includes:

  • Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, paid from taxpayer deficits.
  • Attack on the pillars of democracy: media, elections, courts, civil service, education
  • Cuts to social programs: repeal of the ACA without replacement,
  • Voting restrictions that make it harder for certain people, mostly minorities, to vote.
  • Loosened gun laws. Increased mass shootings.
  • Corporate supremacy (the dictionary definition of Fascism is government by corporations.)
  • Deregulation that favors corporate interests at the expense of the public, especially polluters, banks, casinos.
  • Corporate welfare ( keeps them from leaving.)
  • Weakened consumer protection.
  • Opposition to unions.
  • Deregulation. Foxes to guard the hen house.
  • Privatization of everything including schools, health care, prisons, public land …
  • Little regard for the right of privacy or other human rights. .
  • Cutbacks for public broadcasting, the arts, humanities,
  • refuse Medicaid, killing thousands in some Republican States.
  • Mishandling of the pandemic because they don't believe the science.
  • Disdain for the civil service and expert opinion.
  • Reform [cuts] of social programs that benefit the poor and vulnerable helps pay for the tax cuts.
  • Starved maintenance for infrastructure: trains, bridges, water systems, and other public facilities.
  • Robust funding of stadiums and the military.
  • Breakdown of the wall between church and state, but building a border wall.
  • Repression of women´s health, rights, and abortion.
  • Harsh policing, sentencing, immigrant roundups, crackdowns on sanctuary cities, ratcheting up of security. Armed police . Universal surveillance.
  • Restoration of the death penalty.
  • Denial of climate change and weakened environmental protection.

Where carbon emissions come from in each state (4/28/2022)

States cutting $300 weekly unemployment benefits (5/21/2021)

State Campaigns to Outlaw Abortion Barely Mentioned by Major Outlets (5/19/2021)

Typical Republican: The Racism and Anti-Science behind Texas Gov. Greg Abbot’s Lifting of Covid Restrictions (3/5/2021)

Texas, Land of Wind and Lies (2/18/2021)

They Say They Are Attacking Abortion. They Are Really Hurting the Poor. (2/16/2021)

New US coronavirus hotspots appear in Republican heartlands (5/13/2020)

While rural Americans often tell reporters that they feel neglected and ignored by big-city coastal elites, the people preventing them from getting health care aren’t in New York or D.C., they’re in their own state capitals. And these state politicians hold power in large part thanks to the strong Republican leaning of rural voters. Self-Inflicted Medical Misery, Red America’s homemade rural health crisis. (6/24/2019)

Blue cities and their red states are dividing over coronavirus (3/31/2020)

The Great American Divide (4/20/2020)

Viruses are not partisan. Science itself is not partisan. Nevertheless, Covid-19 has become a partisan issue here in the South because our governors have followed the lead of both the president, who spent crucial early weeks denying the severity of the crisis, and Fox News, which downplayed concerns about the pandemic as Democratic hysteria. That’s why every governor who has issued a deeply belated shelter-in-place order is a Republican. In the American South, a Perfect Storm Is Gathering (4/3/2020)

There is a very interesting book that just came out by Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist, who went to a pretty terribly impoverished area in Louisiana and lived there for six years and studied the people sympathetically. This is deep Trump country, and her results are quite interesting. For example, these are people who are being devastated by chemical and other pollution from the petrochemical industry, but they are strongly opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency. Noam Chomsky

In the Land of Self-Defeat (10/4/2019)

What the Reactionary Politics of 2019 Owe to the Politics of Slavery (8/19/2019)

Self-Inflicted Medical Misery, Red America’s homemade rural health crisis. (6/24/2019)

Unacceptable: Nineteen States Still Allow Corporal Punishment (6/11/2019)

17,000 people will die because Republican states refused Medicaid expansion

What happened in Flint was not a natural disaster. Nor a case of governmental incompetence. What happened there was directly attributable to the prodding of the Mackinac Center, one of the first Koch-funded – and in this case, Koch staffed – state-level “think and do” tanks that now exist in all fifty states and are affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN), also Koch concocted, to coordinate efforts to prevent state government from responding to the demands of the “takers” from Democracy in Chains, The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan For America: Nancy MacLean (2017)

there’s a lot of variation in car safety among states within the U.S., just as there’s a lot of variation in gun violence. America has a “car death belt” in the Deep South and the Great Plains; it corresponds quite closely to the firearms death belt defined by age-adjusted gun death rates. It also corresponds pretty closely to the Trump vote — and also to the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, gratuitously denying health care to millions of their citizens. Paul Krugman

the poor states are right to work states (i.e, anti union), they don't invest in education, they force individuals to pay the tax burden. In some of these states corporations are exempt from income taxes.

The few states where the death penalty is actively practised are overwhelmingly red, which may explain why the United States attorney general, William P. Barr, announced last month that the federal government, which has not carried out an execution since 2003, will resume putting inmates to death in December. Little surprise that at a time when new death sentences are near historic lows, Tennessee is executing people at a precipitous rate. What Part of ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ Don’t We Understand?

If more people voted ...

Yes, America, There Is a Class War, and You Just Lost It

How Much Damage Have Republicans Done in the States? (8/19/2019)

What 13 states discovered after spending hundreds of thousands drug testing the poor (4/26/2019)

Why is it that the poorest States vote Republican ?

States that refused Medicaid expansion (Mostly poor, Republican States.)

Taxpayers Always Lose Industry’s Shell Game With Jobs (12/7/2018)

The states need to form a union.

Which States Have Net Neutrality Laws? (4/9/2018)

Indiana's Brand Of Medicaid Drops 25,000 People For Failure To Pay Premiums (2/1/2018)

Kansas's ravaged economy a cautionary tale as Trump plans huge tax cuts for rich (12/10/2017)

Geography of Upward Mobility

UN shocked by level of poverty in Alabama: 'We haven't seen this in the first world' (12/12/2017)

An Ominous Prediction Of The Impact Of Climate Change On The Southern States.(6/29/2016)

States That Have Stand Your Ground Laws

North Carolina GOP’s Power Grab Represents the End of Democracy (12/15/2016)

It’s a Fact: Republican Run Red States Have America’s Highest Poverty Rates

Study Ranks 50 States by Gun Sense and Gun Deaths (6/20/2014)

Who Turned My Blue State Red ? (11/22/2015)

How does your state rank for integrity? (11/2015)

Oklahoma Earthquakes Are a National Security Threat (10/23/2015)


The cold war was largely about religion, so is the partisan dysfunction in the U.S., and also the differences between red and blue States.

Blue States are better educated. more prosperous and more liberal because they accept that science is the best way to determine fact. Red States, not so much...they are Republican.

If you haven’t been turned off by the bloviating Donald Trump, then look further at what voting Republican buys you:

The nine poorest (lowest median household income) states are Republican.

The 12 states with the worst health care systems are Republican.

Nine of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates are Republican.

Nine of the 10 states with the highest teen age pregnancy rates are Republican.

Nine of the 10 states with the fewest college graduates are Republican.

Who increases the national debt? Ronald Reagan, 189 percent; George H. W. Bush, 55 percent; George W. Bush, 86 percent; -- all Republican. Conversely the debt increased under Presidents Clinton and Obama, both Democrats, by 37 percent and 35 percent, respectively. The Trump tax cuts for the wealthy exploded the deficit.

President Obama lowered Bush W’s yearly deficit from $1.4 trillion to $400 billion.

Republican States are number one in death penalties.

Maybe you would like a couple of more unfunded wars, another tax reduction for the rich, and a new recession? If so, then vote Republican! Keep in mind their agenda.

Richard Metayer (Letter to the New London Day 12/16/2015)

Each of the links below show a map with attributes. View them all to see if Republican policy is beneficial. You'll see the pattern.

States With Most Uninsured

States Most Corrupt

States with highest Gun Death Rates

Education Attainment by State

States with highest rates of poverty

America's Poorest Towns (11/2015)

States With the Highest Rate of Obesity

States with the Best Economy

Debtors Prison For Kids

Red States = Teen Moms

Map of Access to Abortion By State

States That Refused Medicaid Expansion

State Health System Ranking

Low income Healthcare Scorecard

States that vote Republican

Church Attendance by State

The 7 Biggest Deadbeat States Who Mooch Off Taxpayers All Vote Republican

GOP Governors State Tax Proposals Hit Poor Harder (5/6/2015)

9 Of The 10 Least Educated States Voted Republican (11/17/2015)

It’s a Fact: Republican Run Red States Have America’s Highest Poverty Rates(3/18/2014)

States With and Without the Death Penalty

Hate Map


When you look at these maps it is clear that the least educated States with most poverty are also most religious, have poor services, and experience the worst social problems.

They are the Republican States.

Bibliography

The Fall of Wisconsin, The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, Dan Kaufman

What's the Matter with Kansas: Thomas Frank

Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street: John Nichols

Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond: Marc Lamont Hill

Here's what to expect when Republicans win.

See Books.