Already you can see a HUGE difference between liberal and conservative states, in terms of education levels. At the top of the heap, 40.5% of people in Massachusetts have Bachelor's degrees, and 17.7% have advanced degrees. At the bottom of the heap, in West Virginia, those figures are just 19.2% and 7.4%.
In fact, the ten least educated states, in terms of percent with bachelor's degrees, are WV, MS, AR, KY, LA, NV, AL, OK, IN, and TN. That's nine hard-core red states, plus one purple state (Nevada, which went for Clinton but also went for GW Bush twice. That lack of education has an economic impact. As of 2016, Massachusetts has the highest GDP per capita in the nation, at $65,545. Among the ten least educated states, GDP per capita ranks 48, 47, 42, 34, 35, 45, 31, 28, and 38, respectively. with the poorest of those sitting at well under half what we have in Massachusetts.
Right now, that spread among states, in terms of education and earning, is largely an accident of history -- the result of conservative states having mostly been agricultural states, where the path to comfort lay not in self-improvement but in familial ownership of land. Normally we'd expect that gap to decline over time, as agriculture became a less important aspect of the economy, and formerly agrarian areas entered the information age. But the cult of ant-intellectualism on the right may result in the spread actually growing over time. If conservatism embraces, as a cultural feature, a suspicion of higher learning and a contempt for the educated, the more conservatives could actually fall even farther behind over time.
