Want Lower Gas Prices? Move to Bush Country.

posted at 12:07 am on May 9, 2006 by Bryan
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A reader tipped me to this idea about a week ago, but I haven’t had time to look into it much until now. Here’s the gist: If you take the 2000 election county-by-county results map and put it next to a map of current gas prices around the USA, you get a striking result. Bush Country citizens (and illegals, I guess) pay less for gas on average than people in blue America.

Here they are, Bush Country and Gas Country (from gasbuddy.com):

Yellow and orange denote high gas prices in the Gasbuddy map; the greener you get the less you pay for gas. It’s not a perfect analog, but you can see a pretty clear pattern–blue areas on the Bush Country map (Gore voters, therefore liberal) predict pretty well where the orange areas will be on the gas temperature map. There are anomalies like the blue parts of Texas and the red parts of New York state, but Texas a) produces oil and b) has most of its gas taxes set at the state level and it’s a relatively low-tax Bush state. New York c) is a Dem state with many tax policies set long before the RINOs started winning the statehouse there.

So what does this mean? It’s not a perfect match between the two maps, but most likely, environmental regulation and other facts of life in Democrat-dominated states–higher taxation across the board and on gas specifically–make gas cost more in those states. Just look at California and New York, for instance.

So if you really, really want to pay less for gas, move to Bush Country. Or kick out the Democrats who are making you pay more at the pump.

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