Liberalism and dropping population: is there a correlation?

My fellow Ohio blogger at taxmanblog, who calls himself Gordon Gekko, has been on something of a tear about liberals the last few days. While I personally think the conservative-liberal divide is becoming more and more a figment of conservative talk radio's imagination (the real divide being statist-libertarian), taxman does present some interesting data in this chartFive States have lost more than Ohio's just under 400,000, and the percentage losses in Louisiana (no doubt due to Hurricane Katrina), Michigan, and New Jersey are much larger than ours; but if you look at the chart in terms of red States and blue States, notice how red the left column is, and how blue the right one is.

If we want to reverse this trend, we need to start thinking like an independent nation.