It's been noted before that red staters are generally less physically healthy, are more reliant on federal handouts, and are just generally worse off than blue staters in all sorts of social ways: abortion rates, crime rates, welfare rates, unemployment rates, and so on. Yet they vote for Bush, despite failing to live the socially conservative, financially independent lives that the Republican Party supposedly champions.

Most analysis of this from lefty bloggers tends to stop at "what a bunch of hypocrites." But isn't it possible that there's something deeper going on here? Refreshingly, Unfutz offers these acute thoughts:

I don't know if things in the red states are bad, so that people look around them and feel the need for a stronger moral authority to put things right, or, on the other hand, if the desire for a strong moral authority has created the lousy situation in which teens have more kids and more marriages break up. I suspect that the answer will turn out to be a complex interaction between the two, a feedback situation where one reinforces the other.

The Green Knight suspects that Unfutz is on exactly the right track, but suggests the following additional thought. Perhaps the phenomenon has to do with branding, the process by which corporations, and, now, political parties, sell their image to people.

Perhaps people in the red states vote for conservative-brand politicians for the same reason that people buy certain products: because the brand promises to fix what's wrong with your life. In fact, it identifies not only the problems you really do have (high divorce rates, grass stains on your shirt) but also invents problems you didn't know you had in the first place (flag burning, ring around the collar). Then, the brand presents itself as a cure for the problems it identified or invented. And it does so by creating an image of you, the consumer, as a better, freer person for having bought or voted for the right brand.

But, of course, the brand fails to help or possibly makes things worse, so the response is -- buy more! That is, after all, the logic of consumer culture. So people keep buying the more expensive laundry soap even though it's the same damn stuff as Brand X, and keep voting for Republicans even though they never ever really deliver in the culture wars.

I think there's a lot of truth here: branding, positioning and re-framing are all major elements in the success of the right-wing in the past decades -- which means that what's most important is not the content of Democratic policies, but the ways in which they're sold.

Marketing is the key, so let's stop the wearisome internal debates about "moving the party to the left" and becoming "Republicans lite" and concentrate on how to better sell what we've got.

Addendum: In another post, TGK looks at the big picture.