Numbers suggest Republicans, and Trump voters in particular, are more likely than other people to get COVID-19 and die because of it. Big-city liberal newspapers are calling this the “Red COVID” phenomenon.
Early on, a virus that hit Democrats (wealthy world travelers and their neighbors, people in crowded cities, and then predominantly nonwhite workers in places such as meat plants) now disproportionately kills working-class white people and rural residents.
“The political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state,” the New York Times’s David Leonhardt wrote in late September.
Vaccination rates seem to differ immensely by party, with Republicans far less likely to get the shot or give it to their children. This, too, is a reversal from 2020, when all the Democrats’ leading lights were trying to talk people out of trusting the vaccines being developed under Operation Warp Speed — because Donald Trump was president and they were afraid he’d get credit for it.
Democrats, especially as the party becomes the party of the professional upper middle class, have proven more likely to socially distance, more likely to mask, and generally more likely to take extensive anti-coronavirus precautions.
In other words, Republicans lived less sterile lives amid the pandemic. And that partisan gap in sterility has trickled into other parts of life.
Throughout the pandemic, fewer people in America reported a desire to have children. That change, however, is almost entirely among Democrats, according to a study by the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute for Family Studies, and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute.
Republicans were actually more likely to want babies post-pandemic, while desire among Democrats for children fell by a net of 12 percentage points.
The messy-versus-sterile divide might explain the current partisan divide pretty well. One side believes more heavily in vaccines, in “the science,” in technocratic central planning, and small or delayed families. The other side is skeptical of “the science,” more open to risk, and more open to having little germ-bombs running around the house.
The result is some places with busier COVID-19 wards and baby wards (more funerals and more baptisms) and other places with less death and less life.
