Tolerant States Rankings

The "Daily Beast" has put together a list of the most and least tolerant states based on various data including “hate crime” statistics, filed discrimination complaints, fair-housing and fair workplace laws, along with various other information. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-16/ranking-the-most-tolerant-and-least-tolerant-states/full/


I found the results quite interesting…

The Top Ten:
1. Wisconsin
2. Maryland
3. Illinois
4. Pennsylvania
5. Hawaii
6. California
7. Minnesota
8. New Jersey
9. New Hampshire
10. New Mexico

The Bottom Ten:
40. Alabama
41. Kentucky
42. North Dakota
43. Arizona
44. Utah
45. Idaho
46. Ohio
47. Nebraska
48. Kansas
49. Arkansas
50. Wyoming

Personally, I don’t really find it coincidental that the top ten states tend to overwhelmingly vote Democrat and the bottom 10 almost exclusively vote Republican.

In the last three presidential election cycles the states in the top ten all went to the Democrat with the exception of New Hampshire in 2000 and New Mexico in 2004. All voted blue in 2008.

Conversely, the bottom ten all solidly voted Republican in both 2000 and 2004, but in 2008 Nebraska had newly changed their law which required the electoral votes to be split in accordance with the popular vote, so their 5 votes were split 1 for Obama and 4 for McCain.

Ohio voted for Obama in 2008, the first time the state had gone blue since the 90’s…but remember, this is the state that gave us John Boehner, so don’t let their transient blue coloring fool you.