Coronavirus Information...who do you trust?

[Belsnickel]

(07-16-2020, 11:10 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote: I understand this was posted not as something to be published but out of personal interest, and I am not knocking it as it is still a good graph, but as a social studies teacher, I would want to see the same chart with governor party and legislature party as well. All three would be relevant. 

For example, Maryland is heavy blue but with a GOP governor. He is mostly responding to the will of the liberal population, which puts him at odds with many high profile governors. The fact that he is a Republican, the legislature is a veto proof Dem majority, and the state voted heavy Clinton all play into that. 

Louisiana has a blue governor but heavy red legislature and went heavy Trump. Their governor is trying to implement covid rules but is having their GOP AG push back on it as illegal. 

Beyond ideology, we'd also need to see it groups by mask and closure policies, which then could also have their own ideological graphs to see if thse policies correlate to party. 

Looking at those comparisons could be relevant and could provide a more comprehensive picture. However, the most useful category is still the 2016 election results. Even if you looked at the legislature and governor makeups, you have too much of a spectrum on ideology. When you compare election results of those two people, it isn't just a party breakdown, it is two individuals. When you break it up by party but multiple people, the categories really become useless for any sort of comparative statistics.

The idea behind providing comparative statistics like this is to provide the information in an easily digestible format that still provides the correct information. Looking at governors or legislatures alone wouldn't work because, as you point out, often the governor is playing to the tune of the legislature. Well,t he legislature is bicameral in all but one state, so what if that is split? If unified, for or against? And how far to the left or right is each chamber and the executive? There is no way to do that comparison without at least eight categories on party alone, not getting into ideological spectrum. That is a much more complex analysis that would not be as helpful to the reader. Would it be interesting data to get into? Sure. But it defeats the purpose of providing a graph like that when it gets that complex.