Mildly Interesting

I hate that it takes away from the overall point being made, but the "Top 8" list doesn't agree with the table it's (apparently) pulled from. New Mexico should be 6th, not 8th.

On top of that, there's room for disagreement with how the table is calculated: Mississippi, for example, lists 25.4 deaths/100k, but the figures presented only list the number of crashes, not deaths. Crashes/100k results in either 23.2 or 34.1 depending on if you use population or drivers.

I won't challenge the deaths/100k exactly, but putting it that way does seem to "punish" states with more people per car that are in a crash. Carpooling is good, but does result in more deaths per crash. Number of fatal crashes per 100k drivers is a bit more fair to reality, IMHO. It doesn't change the big picture, but does put New Mexico up to 3rd.

The Red/Blue state thing gets more complicated when you take into consideration that Red states tend to be bigger and more rural, resulting in more miles driven. IIHS has "Deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled" for 2023 (https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state), and the top is still dominated by Red states, but New Mexico drops to 9th, while Oregon jumps all the way to 6th.

tl;dr: It doesn't matter how you slice the data, Mississippi sucks.