iStockphoto/TIM MCCAIG

Yale economist Ray Fair has studied the impact of the economy on presidential elections and found that bad economies tend to hurt incumbent parties. Republicans, still smarting from the wounds of last November, know exactly how that process works. Democrats successfully convinced voters that President Bush and his party were to blame for our economic collapse.

Bush certainly deserves some of the blame, but there is plenty to go around. One of the ironies of the last election cycle, in which so much of the map went blue, is that the states that have done the most to hurl the nation into recession have been blue historically. The nearby chart adds intriguing "color" to that observation.

The chart plots the average unemployment rate in April for different categories of blue and red states. The first bar gives the average unemployment rate in April for "reliably" Democratic states, defined as those that have voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since the 1980s. The average unemployment rate in these states was a whopping 9 percent. The remaining bars show that unemployment is less severe in states that only recently began taking Democratic medicine.

The next three bars tell a strikingly different story. The first red bar shows the average for states that switched to the Republican side in the 2000s. Unemployment in these states is a tad below the national average.

The second red bar shows the average unemployment rate in states that switched to red in the 1990s. Unemployment in these states is now well below the national average. The third red bar shows the average for states that have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since the 1980s. Think of these as the "super reliable" red states. The average unemployment rate in these states stood at only 6.7 percent.

States that are traditionally Republican have avoided the worst of this recession. The longer a state has been taking Republican medicine, the better off it is. The contrast between the two patterns could hardly be more noticeable. If Republican policies have been vitamins, Democratic policies have been poison.

The economic data suggest that Democratic policies effectively spread human misery. President Obama now has the political power to do for the nation what Democrats have done to California.

The only consolation is that Professor Fair's model will quite reliably predict political and policy reversals as the economic misery spreads across our nation.

Kevin A. Hassett is a senior fellow and the director of economic policy studies at AEI.