February 22, 2012

People Have Surprisingly Strong Opinions About South Dakota

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Ed Kilgore points me today to a quirky new PPP poll that asks people if they have favorable or unfavorable views of the various states. Hawaii gets the highest number of favorables and Illinois gets the lowest. However, if you look at the delta between favorable and unfavorable, my poor home state ranks last (27% favorable vs. 44% unfavorable). It turns out that a lot of this is driven by partisan animus:

Democrats’ favorite states include Hawaii, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Colorado, and New York, and their least favorites are led by Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi. Republicans love Alaska and Texas, and absolutely hate California, followed distantly by Illinois and Massachusetts.  So the greatest partisan gap is for California, which Democrats like 91 points more than Republicans do, followed by Texas, which is favored more by Republicans by 82 points.

Black voters dislike 10 of the 14 Southern states.

Frankly, I’m surprised so many people even have opinions at all. I mean, Hawaii, sure. Everyone loves Hawaii. But 51% of the respondents expressed an opinion about South Dakota. Who the hell has an opinion about South Dakota? Beats me. In any case, the chart below shows all 50 states ranked by the number of people who feel favorably toward it. How did your state do?

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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