What Is the Difference Between Red State and Blue State?

If you're a Northern industrialist trying to get a factory off the ground, you very much want to see high tariffs against British manufactured goods. And you don't particularly care about the fate of the cotton farm in the south. In that case, you have two different elites there at least. This is a simplified account for the purposes of making a conceptual point. Two different elites that have contradictory economic interests and therefore will politically struggle against each other a bit. Through that struggle, you can get a policy which sometimes favors one a little bit,. Sometimes the other that's flexible, that's situational.