[notacoward]

Are you sure that they don't help the poor, or could it be that they just have more poor? Poor people are more likely to stay in (or gravitate toward) places where more aid is available. They're more likely to die in places where less aid is available due to "you deserved it" moralizing with an undercurrent of discrimination (somehow people who look just like the donors do get aid instead of blame). Also, disproportionately-poor immigrants tend to arrive in "blue" coastal cities and stay in them to be around people with whom they share language and culture.

So yes, there are a lot of poor people in "blue" areas not because of but despite greater efforts to reduce inequality. There are also more people pulling on the other end of the distribution because "blueness" tends to be highly correlated with growth especially in areas like tech and finance. The relative uniformity of "red" areas has a bit of a Harrison Bergeron quality to it, and that's not a good thing.