If the stimulus package had no pork in it, projects and dollars would be allocated regardless of political party. In the regression above, we see a positive and statistically significant (p=10%) relationship between proposed spending per capita and the percent of Democrats in the congressional delegation. Methodology courtesy of Michael Ward:
I threw the state stimulus numbers into excel along with state population and state representation in the House. Lo and behold, you get a positive correlation between the fraction democratic in the state delegation and either that state's number of stimulus projects per 100,000 (rho = 0.13) or stimulus dollars per capita (rho = 0.24). Note that I omitted two outliers (Alabama's $ per capita was 10 times mean and New Hampshire had zero projects).
UPDATE: The projects are NOT yet in the stimulus bill; they are from a "wish list" of mayors.
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