I came across an interesting graphic last week. It displayed, in varying shades of blue, the state-by-state unemployment rates. The darker the shade of blue on the map, the higher was the unemployment rate. It occurred to me that I had seen a similar map. In fact, it looked a lot like last November's electoral map. So I tracked down a map that showed which states voted for which candidate in last year's presidential election and, sure enough, with a few exceptions, those states with the worst unemployment were Obama's states. I checked another site that rated states as blue (Democratic) versus red (Republican) and found that the correlation, though, not quite as good, still matched pretty well. That great swath of middle America, from the Dakotas to Texas, from the Mississippi to the intermountain West, is suffering far less pain during this recession than the mostly blue West Coast, Great Lakes states and the Northeast/Michael Costello, Lewiston Tribune. More here.

Question: What do you think of Costello's analysis that tries to equate Obama/blue states with higher unemployment?