This is a kind of golden age for big-state political comparisons because, of America’s four most populous states, two are red (Florida and Texas) and two are blue (California and New York). Sometimes they line up like you’d expect, but sometimes they don’t.

One might expect government employment as a share of the labor force to be higher in the blue states than in the red states. New York is true to form, with the highest share of government employment since 1990.

But, second for much of that time has been Texas, which has come close to exceeding New York. New York’s share of government employment has declined slightly, from about 17 percent to about 15 percent since 1990. Texas’s share held steady, above 15 percent, until 2010, when it began to decline.

Florida’s share has always been the lowest, but California used to look more like Florida, with government employment shares within one percentage point of each other in 1990. At that time, Florida wasn’t even a red state. It had a Democratic governor for most of the 1990s and was famously a swing state in the 2000s.

Yet through nearly all those political changes, Florida’s share of government employment gradually declined. California’s is basically the same as it was in 1990. The divergence of Florida and California is by far the largest change in the difference between any two of the states.

It was only last year that Texas’s share matched California’s. California is trending upward while Texas is trending downward. That matches partisan expectations, despite the fact that the levels don’t.

Florida really is doing something different, with by far the smallest state budget of any of these states and a consistently declining share of government employment. That separates it from the other red state, Texas, which despite consistent Republican governance still has a large public sector (as many Texas conservatives will tell you with disappointment in their voices). California’s shedding its more libertarian legacy is evident in its divergence from Florida, and New York is always the king of government employment. The graph above fits with some key conceptions about these state’s identities, even if it’s not their partisan identities.