The NYT’s David Leonhardt says further crunching the data shows that there is no difference between Blue America and Red America on social mobility. Excerpt:

It’s true that upward mobility is less common in Deep South. (In the 11 states that made up the Confederacy, the odds of jumping from the bottom fifth of the income distribution in childhood to the top fifth in adulthood were only 6.6 percent, compared with 8.9 percent in the rest of the country.)

But mobility was also notably low in Democratic-leaning Michigan and in the swing state of Ohio. As Paul Krugman noted in his column today, Atlanta and Detroit, which otherwise have little in common, both suffer from low mobility. And while the Northeast and West Coast, Democratic strongholds, have high rates of mobility, some of the highest rates are in Utah, Wyoming and the Dakotas, none of which have voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in almost 50 years.

Conservative regions and liberal regions of this country are different in many ways. On economic mobility, though, those differences largely appear to cancel each other out.