[quote=@Dinh AaronMk] Texas is pretty normal compared to its northern neighbors as well. But if this is for reported rape could there be a difference in terms of how rape is thought of between these states? Alaska - being the northern Florida - is probably about on par with cold-weather expectations. I bet its the Anchorage area that's carrying that state. [/quote] I think Alaska is explained by this... [img]http://mongabay-images.s3.amazonaws.com/14/us-gender-ratio.jpg[/img] It's a state who's primary attraction for immigrants is in the availability of jobs that also happen to be traditionally masculine. There are a lot of oil rig guys, fishermen, truckers, etc, stuck up there with too few women. You can contrast that to the Rocky Mountain states and their blueness because, as someone who used to live in those rocky mountain states i can say, the dark blue there connotes places with very low populations (seeing as they line up exactly with either deserts or mountains), the population centers all being in light blue or light red sections. I'd guess Michigan is probably explained by the poverty up there, but that doesn't explain the others. The only unifying aspect that I can even think to attach to those is the higher Native American populations. Some sense could be made of that since there we'd be talking about populations that are very poor, rural, and isolated, which seems like a good recipe for high rape rates per population... [img]http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhindian.gif[/img] ...but that would leave out Arizona, which would be bizarre, because that includes some of the poorest and most isolated populations of them all. That's not to mention it is a hell of an assumption to make based on basically just guesswork and a loose correlation. So who knows.