How Democrats, Republicans compare
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
Sure, people who are wealthier and live in more stable societies tend to vote Democrat; but that doesn't mean that electing Democrat representatives causes the societies to be wealthier and more stable.
Working hard and being wealthy are also correlated, but that doesn't imply that you can cause people to work hard by giving them lots of money.
(Lest anyone accuse me of political bias here: If I was in the US, I would be voting Democrat, just like the author.)
Ignoring those, your argument boils down to your opinion that voting has no impact on wealth or stability. That cannot be true, at least not unless you subscribe to a deterministic world view, surely?
One could imagine a scenario where a Party X state had vastly impoverished natural resources compared to the typical Party Y state. It's conceivable that typical Party Y policies would have a worse outcome than typical Party X ones in that particular state, even if states that implement Party Y policies tend to have better outcomes overall. It's furthermore conceivable that even states that implement Party Y policies could do better if they had instead implemented Party X ones.
The flaw in this article isn't political, it's statistical.
edit: anonymized parties in the second paragraph.
No. I'm not arguing that there is no causation. I'm arguing that the correlations noted by the author are not evidence of causation.
* Does public policy have tangible, next-day consequences? For example, is the population suddenly healthier, now that the vaunted Health Insurance reform has passed?
Flag it if you think it's off-topic, and then something mysterious and not well documented might or might not happen. Personally, I decided it merited neither an upvote nor a flag.
I've been presented with these exact same arguments back in High School, which was in the early 80s. You can skew the numbers to favor Republicans by just choosing the data ranges from when the politicians actually joined office.
In over two decades of being involved in politics in some capacity I've found that the only difference between the two major parties is how they want to legislate control of my life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Debt_Trend.svg
Err, or maybe not? Even more important, the President doesn't control the budget, congress does. What's the correlation between the budget deficit and the party in congressional control?
We'd be a lot better off if political discussions were founded on substance and reason rather than on silly half-backed "statistics" used to score lame partisan points.
None. Because the factor is actually the interaction between executive and legislative. When republicans have both seats, they have marching orders and follow them to the letter leading to rubberstamping of whatever the other seat wants and budget deficit increases.
When democrats control both seats, pretty much the same historically (might have changed with the Obama administration because Obama's house shows a distinct lack of balls and dem congresspeople haven't found their spine in the 15 years they've been looking for them).
Rep+Dem and Dem+Rep theoretically lead to the same thing, which is the necessity for "bipartisanship" (== exchanging favors actually), limiting the excesses of either side (Clinton admin).
Except now you have to get the current behavioral factors:
* Democrat congresspeople haven't had a spine in 15 years at least (since Reps got congress back in 1994), when faced with the GWB administration they mostly did nothing, from half cowardice and half political calculation (the GWB admin was not getting any better, letting it sink 2 more years and shifting any and all blame to the first 6 years would ensure a sweep in 2008)
* Republicans have gone completely batshit insane, they're practicing scorched-earth politics and since ~2007 they're not just pandering to the most insane side of their base, they're pandering solely to it. This voyage started with the Southern Strategy, Reagan's rhetorics gave it a sharp acceleration, GWB and 9/11 propelled into orbit and after 2007 finally got outside of sanity's gravitational well.
The reasoning about state-by-state indicators and presidential-party preferences is very bogus; you couldn't turn 'red' states into 'blue' states by adopting blue-state policy preferences; for one thing, the red states can't afford them! (Some of those preferences are luxuries purchased with wealth, rather than the original causes of wealth.)
Also consider the following: richer people lean Republican, but richer states lean Democrat. People with high school diplomas are more Republican than those without... but states with higher levels of high-school graduation are more Democratic. Same with undergraduate degrees.
These counterintuitive results for the aggregates are all examples of Simpson's Paradox: