Is Voting Republican Bad for Your Health?

Recently reading an article (here) about a recent report on the relative health of the different states in the United States (here), I noticed that most of the top ten states on the list voted for Barack Obama, while most of the states in the bottom ten voted for John McCain.

That article included only the top ten and bottom ten, but I found that my first impression was true. Eight of the top ten states voted for Barack Obama, while eight of the bottom ten voted for John McCain.

That inspired me to take the complete listing of the states and correlate it with the results of the recent presidential election, which I am presenting here. As you can see, seventeen of the top twenty-five states voted for Obama, while only eight of the top twenty-five voted for McCain. In the bottom half, eleven of the states voted for Obama, while fourteen voted for McCain.

I am going to leave it to someone else to draw conclusions. Before we can do anything with this data, we need to examine the criteria for the list of healthy states. It might be rewarding to make similar correlations between political data and the quality of education, life expectancy, percentage of population in prison, and other variables.

I took the listing of the state of health in the fifty states from:

http://www.americashealthrankings.org/2008/pdfs/2008_whole.pdf

I took the voting results from:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/president

As I said, I cannot draw any conclusions from this. If you have any ideas, I'd like to know.

The health rankings of the fifty states and their voting in the 2008 presidential election (D = Democrat, for Barack Obama; R = Republican, for John McCain):

The top ten states (8 D / 2 R): 1 Vermont - D, 2 Hawaii - D, 3 New Hampshire - D, 4 Minnesota - D, 5 Utah - R, 6 Massachusetts - D, 7 Connecticut - D, 8 Idaho - R, 9 Maine - D, 10 Washington - D

States 11-20 (7 D / 3 R): 11 Rhode Island - D, 12 North Dakota - R, 13 Nebraska -R, 14 Wyoming - R, 15 Iowa - D, 16 Oregon - D, 17 Wisconsin - D, 18 New Jersey - D, 19 Colorado - D, 20 Virginia - D

States 21-30 (6 D / 4 R): 21 South Dakota - R, 22 Kansas - R, 23 Montana - R, 24 California - D, 25 New York - D, 26 Maryland - D, 27 Michigan - D, 28 Pennsylvania - D, 29 New Mexico - D, 30 Alaska - R

States 31-40 (5 D / 5 R): 31 Illinois - D, 32 Ohio - D, 33 Arizona - R, 34 Indiana - D,35 Delaware - D, 36 North Carolina - R, 37 Kentucky - D, 38 Missouri - R, 39 West Virginia - R, 40 Alabama - R

States 41-50 (D 2 / R 8): 41 Georgia - R, 42 Nevada - D, 43 Arkansas - R, 43 Oklahoma - R, 45 Florida - D, 46 Texas - R, 47 Tennessee - R, 48 South Carolina - R, 49 Mississippi - R, 50 Louisiana - R

So, à votre santé (to your health!), and let's all rally together to improve the health of our nation.