Recession blues.(economic conditions affect presidential elections )

YALE economist Ray Fair has studied the impact of the economy on presidential elections and found that bad economies tend to hurt incumbent parties. Republicans, still smarting from the wounds of last November, know exactly how that process works. Democrats successfully convinced voters that President Bush and his party were to blame for our economic collapse.

Bush certainly deserves some of the blame, but there is plenty to go around. One of the ironies of the last election cycle, in which so much of the map went blue, is that the states that have done the most to hurl the nation into recession have been blue historically. The nearby chart adds intriguing "color" to that observation.

The chart plots the average unemployment rate in April for different categories of blue and red states. The first bar gives the average unemployment rate in April for "reliably" Democratic states, defined as those that have voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since the 1980s. The average unemployment rate in these states was a whopping 9 percent. The remaining bars show that unemployment is less severe in states that only recently began taking Democratic medicine.

The next three bars tell a strikingly different story. The first red bar shows the average for states that switched to the Republican side in the ...