Rich States, Poor States

Andrew Gelman has been doing some interesting analysis on correlating voting behaviour with income, and has a forthcoming book on the subject. This post on rich vs poor states and rich vs. poor voters is fascinating. The basic story is that if you look at rich states vs. poor states, the rich states tend to vote Democratic and the poor states tend to vote Republican. But if you look at individuals, rich individuals tend to vote Republican and poor individuals tend to vote Democratic. Also, within rich states the correlation tends to break down. So in a state like Connecticut, voting behaviour will be much less tied to income than it will be in Alabama.