Naturally (as expected) small gov't low tax policies generally flowed with growing economies but what snagged us were the anomalies --Alaska did so poorly yet West Virginia soared.   Seems we can overcome that by ourselves and get all the state numbers for GDP from the BEA along w/ employment states by state from the BLS --and then toss them into online mapping websites (I used iMapBuilder Online).

Got to just love this info age!!

Starting w/ Wikipedia's table of state voting patterns we can have an index (data here) that gives us the standard red/blue state plot:

       [click image to enlarge]>>>

For state economic growth, many of us were skeptical of the BEA's 2013 map so this one on the left is ranking two years of growth. 

The econ and voting maps are close but they're definitely not identical.  The left coast economies show up as strong while Alaska comes out as a low growth state. 

OK, so while GDP is important it's not everything --

--emploment matters too.

Lots of people have seen this headline unemployment map from the BLS showing unemployment by state, but the shrinking workforce goes by state just like it's gone nationwide  --that low unemployment rate just means folks gave up job hunting.   

We need to see the job market in terms of the total population, so here's state employment as a percent of total working age non-institutional groups.

mho is that while nothing's solid, we've definitely got trends and voting patterns do show up in economic strength.  Don't get me wrong, we all know this is correlation and not causality --it's just as easy to say economies ruined by the right are now making people vote liberal.

Uh-huh.