People have been predicting for weeks that regions of the country previously insulated from the worst of the coronavirus would soon be feeling the brunt of the disease. That time has clearly come as cases spike all across the Sunbelt while the governors of those states almost uniformly prioritize dollars over saving lives.
But these two graphs from the Washington Post put a visual to the data that really drives the point home.
Note the rate of new infections falling quite precipitously in blue states/counties while the polar opposite happens in red states/counties.
As the Post notes, since June 1, 60% of the new coronavirus cases were recorded in states Trump won in 2016 while Trump counties accounted for 41% of new infections. That is partly due to increased testing in some of those regions, but that's certainly not the whole picture as the Trump administration would have us believe. Specifically, big upticks in Florida, Texas, and Arizona haven't been primarily due to higher rates of testing. If that were the case, hospitals in those states wouldn't be reporting record levels of hospitalizations in some regions. And in Florida, testing is merely in a holding pattern as cases spike.
What's so amazing about all this is that Trump declared himself to be a “wartime president” back in March, when he found it politically expedient to be seen as taking charge of the national response to the pandemic. But when the pandemic showed no signs of waning and Trump had thoroughly disgraced himself on the national stage, he simply accepted defeat and moved on to being the so-called “law and order” president in the wake of the George Floyd killing.
Now we can see that Trump's abandonment of the pandemic fight in late May/early June took place at almost precisely the point when red states began to account for a majority of all new coronavirus cases in the nation. In other words, the supposed “wartime president” surrendered the fight and fled the battlefield right as his troops were being overwhelmed by the enemy.