The campaign is over. The votes are counted. Barack Obama will be president of the United States for the next four years. These are facts. Other facts have been making the rounds of facebook and twitter - facts like red states are poorer, less educated, and fatter than blue states (one source, but this is generally known). They also take more than they put in to the federal kitty (source). Liberals obviously say "see!?" and conservatives assert, correctly I think, that correlation is not causation. But there is a real question as to why this correlation exists. There is a lot of talk now about the Republicans needing to attract the minority vote. There is less, right now, about the Democrats needing to work on the heartland (or the south). But they are still there, and sooner or later someone is going to have to figure them out. Not just for political gain, I hope, but also because a region like the one caricatured by the 'fat, dumb, and poor' red state image put forward by some is somewhere we should all want to make better - regardless of how it votes.