The most patriotic states
Someone told me they're blue, but that's thanks to a flawed methodology.
Having had a website for many years, I’ve been placed on a lot of mailing lists and oftentimes they’re trying to pitch a story. So a week or two ago I got a missive from WalletHub, which is normally a financial service company, telling me about the most patriotic states in America. It didn’t surprise me that the top five were Virginia, Montana, Alaska, North Dakota, and Maine - Delaware came in 15th - but what did surprise me was this line: “Blue states are more patriotic, with an average ranking of 25.20, compared with 25.80 for red states (1 = Best).” There was no way, I said, but there was a way.
If you take the time to scroll down their article regarding the study, you’ll see that they use a rather simple methodology, ranking states on a total of 13 factors divided into two buckets: 25 points for military engagement (split into four areas) and 75 points for civic engagement (split into nine areas.) There were two areas which immediately jumped out at me when I looked through the subpoints.
First is the math aspect. They gave 25 points to military engagement, but the interesting part is that they gave triple weight to average military enrollees per 1,000 people but only double weight to active-duty personnel. They only gave single shares to veterans and reservists. Seems like the first two aspects should be reversed.
WalletHub gave a double-weighted sample to states that had the largest percentage of voters in the 2020 Presidential election. Obviously some states had bigger turnouts than others, but the other trick is that this turned out to be the biggest indicator of all. Moreover, “blue” states that had bigger turnout because of mail-in balloting did better while most “red” states had lower turnout because those people chose to vote in person. The 2020 election had an artificial bump in it.
And remember how I noted that veterans and reserves only had single shares of the pie when it came to the military engagement? Dividing 75 points among the nine aspects of civic engagement provided for a different number, so despite the fact that AmeriCorps and Peace Corps engagement was only a half-share, their total contribution outweighed that of veterans and reservists (8.34 points to 7.14 points.) I don’t know about you, but frankly I consider a member of the military more patriotic than a member of the Peace Corps.
Volunteerism overall, which included “participation in groups and organizations,” was worth 25 points of the 100-point scale, but church membership was worth zero. I guess they really believe in separation of church and state at WalletHub.
Obviously if you manipulate the data a certain way, you’ll get the results you want. What’s interesting to me is how much they had to twist things just to give the “blue” states a win. This isn’t to say that conservatives don’t slice, dice, and make Julienne fries out of data when it suits their purposes, but this was just a little bit too much to believe so I figured there was a reason they came out with the conclusion. Either that or they looked me up and, because I live in a state that foolishly voted for its “hometown” hero in 2020 to become categorized once again as a “blue” state, I personally tipped the scales. Okay, I doubt it too, but the point is there are patriotic people in blue states just as there are slackers in red states. As a whole, though, the reason states tend to be “red” is that they have more patriotic people when measured in traditional ways.
What this does, though, is make me wonder just what other BS WalletHub will cheerfully tell you. I briedly perused their website and it looks like they deal in financial services and credit scores - are they going to be upfront and honest about your financial situation or stretch the truth to sell some sort of service to you? I guess if they were looking for free publicity, they got it, but sometimes what you get is debt you wish you didn’t incur.