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The Political Coronavirus Paradox: Where the Virus Was Worst, Voters Supported Trump the Most

It’s Time To Go

It’s Time To Go

Member
Dec 2, 2017
20,612
We will never know whether President Donald Trump could have won reelection if a novel coronavirus hadn't torn across the planet in the final year of his presidency, just as the months-long impeachment saga was drawing to a close. (Did you remember that Trump was impeached?) There's a strong argument that the President's delayed response and mishandling of the pandemic was the one thing during campaign season that no amount of his trademark misdirection could deflect.
But while early indications suggest that the deadly disease was the most driving factor among those who voted for President-elect Joseph Biden, while the moribund economy it spurred was of most concern to the outing President's supporters, there lies a strange conundrum here: The regions of the country that Trump carried have also been those most plagued by COVID-19 since late August, according to TIME's analysis of Associated Press voting results by county and the local rates of COVID-19 since March. On Nov. 3, the day of the election, the counties that broke for Trump had a collective rate of 38 new infections a day per 100,000 people, compared to 27 in those that supported Biden.
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A week out from the election, we have fairly complete data on returns in almost all of the 3,141 counties and county equivalents. At present, Biden has won 491 counties to Trump's 2,544, which will shift marginally when the last few counties come in. When one tallies the number of cases in those two different blocs of counties, day by day, the rate of new cases per day flipped from being consistently higher in Biden Territory to considerably worse in Trump's physically larger, more rural turf on Aug. 20, days before Trump accepted the nomination at the Republican National Convention.

On one hand, this is not shocking, given that we've known since September that the virus, which first struck hardest in dense, urban areas, has gradually moved outward to suburban and rural regions (where more Trump supporters live) as the third wave far surpasses the first two in the U.S. Moreover, leaders in some Republican-leaning states have been reluctant to issue restrictions meant to curb viral spread. Still, all evidence suggests that, while COVID-19 may have been more paramount in the minds of those who supported Biden, it was considerably more prevalent among the population of those who did not.
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time.com

The Political Coronavirus Paradox: Where the Virus Was Worst, Voters Supported Trump the Most

U.S. counties that have recently seen increased rates of coronavirus infections were more likely to vote for Trump in the 2020 election.
time.com time.com
 
Man God

Man God

Member
Oct 25, 2017
38,301
The places that don't treat it seriously vote Republican, and because they don't take it seriously they are getting crushed as winter approaches. Shocking.
 
firehawk12

firehawk12

Member
Oct 25, 2017
24,165
I don't know if that's much of a surprise though - the places where it hit the worst had the worst lock down and infection control measures because of MAI FREEDUMS so...
 
ElectricBlanketFire

ElectricBlanketFire

What year is this?
Member
Oct 25, 2017
31,833
I wonder why the areas most likely to deny science are getting hit the most.

It's a mystery, that's for sure.
 
echoshifting

echoshifting

very salt heavy
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
14,699
The Negative Zone
It's so aggravating to see Time frame this as some sort of mystery when the election merely proved once again that conservatives would literally rather die than vote any other way.
 
Garlador

Garlador

Banned
Oct 30, 2017
14,131
Well-well-well-if-it-isn-t-the-consequences-of-my
 
cwmartin

cwmartin

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,765
find the correlation of education level and likeliness to vote Trump 2020 (hint: it's already been done and says exactly what you think it does)
 
Ripcord

Ripcord

Member
Oct 30, 2017
1,777
Since day one it's been a competition here in Iowa to see how many people we can kill with covid. From both the local gov and the populace. I've never seen Iowans knowingly put other Iowans at risk at such a large scale. It's been illuminating.
 
Digital Dinosaur

Digital Dinosaur

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,036
Rita Repulsa's Moon Palace
Calling this part of American culture a death cult is accurate. Trumpism is something like its final form. That hillbilly mentality that life is suffering, and the best you can hope for is to drag others down with you. It is why they love Trump's rallies so much, where he mostly just bitches and whines and belittles other people, rather than trying to elevate the audience.

I mean we listened to people at the rallies saying they didn't care about their own relatives who died from covid, and shrugged and said it didn't matter if they died.
 
Parthenios

Parthenios

The Fallen
Oct 28, 2017
13,606
This isn't a paradox. These aren't the worst hotspots randomly; they are the worst hotspots because of their Trump support.
 
captmcblack

captmcblack

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,061
Looking at the NYC election map, it's *literally* 1 to 1, lmao.

It's honestly amazing how it matched up.
 
Lost Lemurian

Lost Lemurian

Member
Nov 30, 2019
4,295
It's almost like Republicans don't really care about real-world issues and vote entirely on fantasy problems like white genocide and Democrat pedophile cabals.

This is only a "paradox" if you treat the average voter as a rational actor, which they are not.
 
entremet

entremet

You wouldn't toast a NES cartridge
Member
Oct 26, 2017
60,011
That headline writer for TIME is framing it so stupidly. It's a clear correlation. There's no paradox.
 
Kyrona

Kyrona

Member
Jul 9, 2020
509
We have legitimately a full wing, twice the size of our other patient care areas, full of covid parients atm. Half of them are on vents.


Many of the nurses still support Trump, and our district went 74-25 red. It blows my mind.
 
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