Environmental Protection and Politics : Per Capita Gasoline Consumption by State Correlates with Presidential Election Voting in 2008 with Republican States Using More and Democratic States Using Less

Take a look here at environmental protection and Presidential election politics from a different angle and with a new twist.

While testing the new "Google Reader Play" we ran across the Infrastructurist.com by Martha Kang Mcgill, who presents  a gasoline per capita consumption map of the United States by individual State, a map which looks curiously similar to a New York Times map of the 2008 Presidential election results by State in the United States, which we had archived in our memory.

So we compared the two maps.

On the whole, the "red states" (who voted Republican for McCain) use more gasoline per capita than the "blue states" (who voted Democrat for Obama), which can not be a function of wealth, since the Southern states are generally poorer. The colors show the per capita consumption, while the size of a state shows total consumption. Why would this possible per capita gasoline correlation exist?