Gas Prices vs. Voter Preference for President

Thanks to Coach Brown (see A Passion for Teaching and Opinions on the blogroll at left)--who says I'm his favorite blogger!--I learn about GasBuddy, a web site that tracks gas prices across the nation.

Here's the map showing gas prices.

Here's the map of the 2004 Presidential election.

Wouldn't it make an great little experiment for someone with more technical savvy than I have to superimpose those maps--and have the image click back and forth between the maps every second or so? Or even better, just use this map showing who won the state, so it doesn't go county by county.

Notice anything about the price of gas in Kerry-voting states vs. the price of gas in Bush-voting states? Sure, there are a couple of exceptions, but the correlation is quite strong.

BTW, click on the 2nd map above and look at California. Notice how much of it is colored Republican, but the biggest cities are colored Democrat? Can you use that map and find the biggest cities in the country, just by looking at the blue places? I can, too.