The nation’s red and blue states often are miles apart in social attitudes and, of course, in political outlook.  

It turns out that they also divide into distinct camps when it comes to a grimmer measure -- fatal traffic accidents.

To an extent that mystifies safety experts and other observers, federal statistics show that people in red states are more likely to die in road crashes. The least deadly states – those with the fewest crash deaths per 100,000 people -- overwhelmingly are blue.

In the absence of formal definitions for red or blue states, we labeled as red the states that favored Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and as blue those that supported the re-election of President Barack Obama.