How Coronavirus Breaks Down Along Political Lines – By Aaron Zitner, John McCormick, Dante Chinni (The Wall Street Journal) / April 5 2020
The moves by state governments to slow the coronavirus outbreak follow the contours of a familiar map, one that traces the lines of the nation’s political divisions.
Because the outbreak has hit urban areas harder than less-populated communities, it has been felt less in the nation’s Republican strongholds than in Democratic ones, bringing a partisan tint to views of how the outbreak is being experienced and should be addressed.
That has also meant that some Republican elected officials have been hesitant to call for statewide stay-at-home orders for fear of upending rural areas that have yet to record many cases or any at all.
As of Thursday, 91% of counties that voted for Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 had at least one case of coronavirus, and 47% had at least one death, a Wall Street Journal analysis of virus data compiled by Johns Hopkins University shows.
By contrast, 69% of counties that voted for President Trump had at least one case, and 14% had a death. Those counties on the whole are less densely populated than Clinton counties, and most rural areas tend to lean Republican.
Only about a fifth of the states, all with large rural populations and Republican governors, didn’t have statewide stay-at-home directives in place as of Friday. The GOP governors of Florida, Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee, who had resisted issuing statewide shelter-in-place orders, were among those who reversed course and imposed them this past week.
Discrepancies between rural and urban America are creating tensions within states.
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