[This article was first published on Online College Math Teacher, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. Overview Do people in red states live shorter lives? This project examines whether state level life expectancy is statistically associated with each state’s political climate in the 2024 presidential election. Political climate is measured using the popular vote margin, defined as (Trump votes – Harris votes) / (Trump votes + Harris votes). A positive value indicates a Republican advantage, and a negative value indicates a Democratic advantage. I’m not predicting elections, and I’m not making a claim of causality. There are many reasons why two states differ in life expectancies – differences in average income, availability of medical care, occupations with differing job hazards, etc. I’m just asking whether these two measurable state‑level quantities move together. A scatterplot of life expectancy versus vote margin shows a clearly downward trend: states with higher Republican vote margins tend to have lower life expectancy, and states with higher Democratic margins tend to have higher life expectancy. The correlation coefficient r is -0.50. This represents a moderate negative relationship – neither weak nor strong, but unmistakenly present. A significance test yields t = -4.041, p = .00019. With 51 observations, this correlation is statistically significant at the .05 level. Details I obtained 2024 presidential percentage popular vote data from the Federal Election Commission. Trump won 31 of 51 (50 plus DC) states in 2024. To visualize the distribution of states, I grouped the vote margin varaible into four bins: Dem Majority: margin ≤ -10% Dem Narrow: -10% < margin ≤ 0 Rep Narrow: 0 < margin ≤ 10% Rep Majority: margin > 10% 24 of Trump’s 31 states were by margins greater than 10%. A bar chart and a US map show how many states fall into each group and where they are located geographically. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) publishes life expectancy tables by state.These are period life tables, showing the life expectancy of a newborn under today’s mortality rates, assuming the age‑specific death rates observed in that year (e.g., 2022) stay fixed for the newborn’s entire lifetime. Hawaii has the highest life expectancy at 80.0 years, and Mississippi has the lowest at 70.9 years. The following map shows life expectancies by state. I allocated the states by quartile (shortest life expectancy, shorter, longer, longest). I believe there is a relationship especially with southern states having short life expectancies in this map, compared with Republican margins in the prior map. The actual correlation coefficient is r = -0.50, which is moderate, but statistically significant. Incidentally, I had a little challenge drawing the maps with R library usmap. That library includes Puerto Rico which was not in the voter or life expectancy data, and the map would show Puerto Rico as an NA until I excluded it in the plot_usmap statement. R codelibrary(readxl)pres