Weird US Voting

All democracies are flawed, of course, and voting techniques rife with issues of concordance and transitivity. And we all know how Western media loves to criticise democracies such as India where, well, they are dark, aren’t they? But this Krugman piece is especially good, talking about how skewed voter perception and reality is. Apparently, “red” states (who voted conservative and for Bush) receive the highest amount of federal subsidies and have the most social problems… and perhaps not uncoincidentally the highest rates of church attendance (Maybe they feel they need a good dose of churching more than most). But “blue” states, which contribute most of the money, tend to vote liberal and for people like Gore who, apparently, promise to raise their taxes further. This runs counter to classic political economics strategy, which demonstrates as a field how close it is to reality, just like classical economics with all of its rationalist consumers and perfect market theory. Yah, right. Anyway, this guy’s done some academic work demonstrating how arse-backwards conservative voting patterns actually are: the people who get the most complain the loudest.

Now, you could get all psychoanalytic here, and argue that the vehemence which many conservatives display to the federal government stems from a deep-seated neurosis concerning the origins of their largesse. They know it’s those damn pinko fags in the big coastal cities paying for their infrastructure and their freedom to form silly militias and go hunting on state lands, but they repress this knowledge and try to expel it from their psyche and so rant and rave about these same pink fag city boys.

Sadly, due to the widespread gerrymandering and vote rigging in the US electoral system — and the in-built over-representation of low-population States — conservatives seem likely to retain an influence far in excess of their financial or population clout for as long as the US constitution persists.