Thread by @charles_gaba

This is getting some traction again thanks to @jonathanweisman’s piece yesterday and the controversy regarding his framing of it (which I have mixed feelings about), so here it is again: acasignups.net/21/11/17/red-s…

Here’s what the cumulative COVID county-level death rate looked like by Trump’s 2020 vote as of July 2020, after the first wave ended. It was 7.6x higher in the Bluest tenth of the country than the Reddest tenth.

By Election Day 2020, the Reddest counties had already started to @catch up:” The bluest bracket was only twice as high cumulatively as the reddest bracket:

By New Year’s Day 2021, the death rate in the Bluest bracket was just 12% higher than the Reddest bracket:

As @LOLGOP noted, this made my jaw drop when I noticed it: January 20, 2021, just happened to be the day that the cumulative COVID death rate in Red America began to surpass that of Blue America. Even the *averages* of the bluest 50% & reddest 50% brackets are almost dead even.

By July 2021 (right when Delta started to hit the U.S.), the script had flipped: The rate in the reddest tenth was 14% *higher* than in the bluest tenth:

That brings us to mid-November: The last bracket is now nearly 50% higher than the first cumulatively:

Here’s what it looks like in 2-week increments from March 2020 - November 2021:

Here’s my post from a month ago (an update to an earlier version from September) which made the same points that Weismann did yesterday. The debate is over the *framing* of the same ugly realities: acasignups.net/21/11/03/simpl…

Finally, here’s the post with the actual data cited by Weismann in his NY Times story yesterday for completeness: acasignups.net/21/11/22/weekl…