The so-called blue states are also part of the American republic.
Someone should remind the president.
On Sept. 16, during a White House press briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump claimed that the United States has handled the outbreak particularly well, especially if you exclude the coronavirus-related death tolls recorded in “blue states.”
“If you look at what we’ve done and all of the lives that we’ve saved,” he told reporters. “This was our prediction — that if we do a really good job, we’ll be at about … 100,000 to 240,000 deaths. And we’re below that substantially, and we’ll see what comes out. But that would be if we did the good job. If the not-so-good job was done, you’d be between 1.5 million — I remember these numbers so well — and 2.2 million. That’s quite a difference.”
Trump added, “So we’re down in this territory. And that’s despite the fact that the blue states had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at. We’re really at a very low level. But some of the states, they were blue states and blue state-managed.”
This is wrong both factually and morally.
First, there is the question of the “blue state” designation. Traditionally, whether a state is “red” or “blue” is determined by how it voted in the previous presidential election.
Using this rubric, the “blue states” in the union include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. The “red states” include Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
As of this writing, the total coronavirus death toll in the U.S. is 199,268. If we remove the COVID-19 deaths recorded in the aforementioned “blue states,” the nationwide figure then becomes 94,355, which would cut the current per capita death rate of 60 per 100,000 people to about 48 (this accounts also for removing the populations of the “blue states”). But even then, that still leaves the U.S. with a higher per capita death rate than France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Argentina, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, India, Japan, and many, many others.
So, no, Trump’s assertion that the U.S. would be “at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at” if you exclude “blue state” deaths is not even factually accurate.
That leaves us then with the other more loathsome aspect of the president’s remarks, which is that his assertion is as callous as it is partisan, needlessly pitting state against state.
Democratic Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Phil Murphy of New Jersey deserve every bit of criticism they get. In fact, they should be hounded from public service, never allowed to forget the role their disastrous management and policies played in the deaths of hundreds of COVID-19 patients.
But their failures are not a “blue state” versus “red state” issue. It is an issue of bad governance, which knows no party loyalty. Trump could have made his apparent point about feckless leadership and its correlation to astronomically high death rates without the partisan red meat. But even then, what would have been the point? His remark would still amount to: The U.S. would be in better shape if things were different. And this is to say nothing of the absurdity of the president of the U.S. asserting that things in the U.S. would be better so long as you ignore vast swaths of the U.S.
Further, so long as we are on the topic of “blue state” leadership, Democratic Govs. Jay Inslee of Washington and Kate Brown of Oregon have kept their per capita death rates to 26 and 12 per 100,000 people, respectively, which is even more impressive when you consider their states were some of the first in the nation to be infected with the virus from Wuhan. Washington and Oregon got the virus long before there was a nationwide scramble to understand the outbreak. Does their success count as a “blue state” victory, or are we supposed to ignore their steady leadership because it upsets the partisan talking point?
The Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been a series of missteps and failures, including the about-face on whether masks are even necessary. On Wednesday, as the president attempted to manipulate the data to fit a political narrative, the White House failed yet again.
