Something you touch on that I love to talk about: People often think that today's Religious Right is descended from the Puritans, but that isn't true. In truth, the Religious Right is a mixture of slaveowner culture and Scotch-Irish culture while today's "blue state America" is a mixture of Puritan culture, Quaker culture, and the cultures of various immigrant groups. The Puritans valued education, didn't care for westward expansion, and frowned upon gun dueling.
That ideology is based around the same values that made Irish Protestants hare Catholics. The orangemen even seem KKK esque.
Red state governors also like trying to describe their states as paradise as jobs and people are moving to many red states. If blue states had a different economic model, it’d make that argument weaker.
