Coffee is a beverage loved by people from all walks of life. Wealthy, needy, leftists, rightists, people of all stripes and creeds find common ground in this humble beverage. But while coffee is loved equally by everyone, some may love it a little more than others. A fresh study finds that Democratic-leaning states are more likely to be “coffee obsessed” than Republican states.
Made by Coffee-likea German website that reviews coffee equipment, tests uses two main metrics to determine what they call a “comprehensive ‘coffee obsession’ score”: an analysis of Google search data and an analysis of coffee shop density. For the search results data, Coffeeness examined search volumes for “coffee-related terms that pertain to both at-home and coffee shop consumption” to determine the total number of searches per capita for each state. Each state was then assigned a score of 1–50 based on the findings.
To analyze the density, the website used “multiple sources to figure out how many people per coffee shop in each state,” assigning each state a different score from 1 to 50. The two scores will then be combined to give a state’s coffee obsession score. The higher the score, the more coffee-obsessed the state is.
Those scores were then compared to each state’s political leanings, based on how the states voted in the last presidential election. They found that nine of the top 10 and 15 of the top 17 coffee obsession scores were in Democratic-leaning states. Idaho, in eighth place, and Ohio, in 13th place, were the only two “red states” in the top 17, with scores of 74 and 61, respectively.
The highest scores went to the coastal elite: Massachusetts and Connecticut in the east, and California, Oregon, and Washington (and Hawaii) in the west.
Coffeeness attributes these findings to a few factors. For one, larger cities tend to have stronger coffee cultures, and many of the largest cities in the country are located in blue states (and even those in red states, like Houston and Dallas, Texas, tend to vote blue). On the other hand, they say red states can be geographically averse to coffee. Many Republican strongholds are in the South, where it’s sizzling, making the drink theoretically less desirable to some residents, and where there’s a powerful iced tea culture that could take some of the drink’s awareness away from coffee consumption.
Of course, there are great coffee cities in more conservative states, and this study is not the be-all and end-all on that front. Cities like Austin, Kansas City, Recent Orleans, Atlanta, Miami, and Bentonville, to name a few, are world-class destinations for specialty coffee culture, and they’re all in traditionally Republican states. So it’s not exactly black and white, or blue and red. Maybe the world needs more coffee. This is our last hope for getting cat lovers and couch potatoes together.
