There's a far better fit between Bush's share of the vote and lack of real estate inflation. In Texas, where Republicans have grown in strength over the decades, housing prices are up only 89 percent since 1980, the second lowest growth rate in the country (only Oklahoma has had less housing inflation). In California, however, home prices are up 315 percent since 1980. (First is John Kerry's Massachusetts at 516 percent.)
Home inflation in Texas over the last two dozen years is especially low because 1980 was near the peak of the oil boom, but, then, real estate prices were high in California in 1980 too.
This restrained land price growth for Texas reflects a bedrock geographic reality about the metropolises of Texas, and of red states as a whole. Red state cities simply have more land available for suburban and exurban expansion because most of them are inland and thus not hemmed in by water, unlike the typical blue state city, which is on an ocean or a Great Lake.
Let's look at the 50 most populous metropolitan areas in the country. Of the ones in blue states, 73 percent of their population lives in cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, where physical growth is restricted by unbridgeable water, compared to only 19 percent of the population of the biggest red state metropolises, such as Dallas, Atlanta, and Phoenix.
The Law of Supply and Demand controls housing prices. The greater supply of available land for suburban expansion in red metropolises keeps house prices down.
Contrast the Dallas-Fort Worth conurbation, the largest in red America, to San Francisco, culturally the bluest spot on the entire map.
Exurban Dallas-Fort Worth can expand outward around 360 degrees of flat, adequately watered land, easily bulldozed into lots and streets. In sharp divergence, San Francisco sits on a peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean to the west, the San Francisco Bay to the east, and mountain ranges to the north and south. This makes for superb scenery, but also for vastly expensive homes within an hour's commute of downtown San Francisco.
(Amusingly, there's even a correlation between the quality of the views in a city and the local enthusiasm for environmentalist Democratic candidates. Scenic views create liberal views. On average, the denizens of hilly San Francisco can see farther from their backyards than the residents of flat Dallas, so they are more inclined toward not-in-my-back-yard opposition to unsightly developments.)
San Francisco therefore fills up with two kinds of people who don't need as much space per paycheck -- singles, most famously gays, and immigrants from countries where families don't expect American-style square footage. Neither is likely to vote Republican. The Chinese in San Francisco might have conservative social views, but, as journalist Arthur Hu has perceptively pointed out, they tend to take their voting cues from their native neighbors, who are more often than not quite liberal.
