I spent a few minutes after lunch while procrastinating from grading, putting together the following data. First I took the states by the 2012 Obama minus Romney vote share in percent by state [1], and then teacher salaries by state [2]. Then I ran linear regression on the sucker. R2 is not a shabby 0.347. See here:
One thing you can read off the graph for example is that: Each 1 percent of vote flipped from Republicans to Democrats gives teachers a $682 yearly pay raise. Of course I am greatly simplifying 🙂 But the trendline is clearly there.
See the full spreadsheet, if you want to see and play with the whole data, though I didn’t really clean it up much.
I’m sure someone already did this somewhere…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012#Results_by_state
