Competitiveness and Blueness

OK, so I still haven't read the report that Warren posted about state competitiveness. Nonetheless, I opened it, saw the data, and instantly new what my question was.

I've been saying that this whole idea about big shifts in the red-blue map is generally overblown, but when it comes to economic success, there may be some real change (like Colorado and Virginia going blue, and Missouri going red).

So I did a very simple regression on the Overall Index value by Dem margin of victory per state in '08 minus that in '04. (So losing a state by 20 in '04 and by 16 in '08 comes out to be the same as losing a state by 1 in '04 and winning it by 3 in '08, etc.) I first did all the states; then I did it again omitting AK, AR, DE, HI, IL, MA, and TX to eliminate home-state effects (I believe Hillary's one-time candidacy did significantly hurt Obama in Arkansas).

The results are astounding! r^2 of 60%! P-value of 0.000038. There is no doubt that more competitive states saw bigger blue shifts in 2008. A score of 0 in the report corresponds to a red shift of 6.74%. Then, for each add'l point in the index, the state shifts blue by a whopping 3.36%. So all else equal, if Kerry lost a state by 10 points in 2004 but it has a competitiveness index of 5.00 - right at the median, then Barack Obama would have been ever-so-slightly favored to win the state in 2008.

I'll do more with this in the coming weeks.

Oh, and yet another complaint about the electoral college - when the EVs are redistributed following the 2010 census, it's likely that only blue states will lose EVs and only red states will gain them. This happened in 2000 as well - John Kerry played on a tougher map than Al Gore by about 5 EVs.