"WW C"- COVID-19, GLOBAL CASES SURPASS 676 MILLION...Here we go again 2025 are we ready for Trump to fuck this up again?



The novel coronavirus continues to shift our political geography. The latest development: It’s now penetrating counties in the battleground states that were carried by President Trump, which raises the possibility that it could reconfigure the political equation in ways we don’t expect.
Here at Plum Line, we’ve been reporting regularly on the work of demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution, who has been tracking the spread of coronavirus week by week.

Back in late April, Frey found that coronavirus was invading whiter, more Republican, small-metropolitan and outer-suburban areas. That upended our previous understanding of the disease as mostly confined to urban and blue-leaning areas.

Then, in early May, Frey found that coronavirus was spreading into more counties in the key battleground states. That suggested the politics of coronavirus was growing increasingly unpredictable.

Now Frey is back with still another tranche of data, and those two trends are coming together into one: Coronavirus is spreading into many Trump counties in the battleground states.

First, the bigger picture.

In the last three weeks, Frey finds, some 548 counties across the country carried by Trump have newly become what Frey calls “high-covid,” which means they have reported 100 or more cases per 100,000 residents. By contrast, only 102 counties carried by Hillary Clinton have become high-covid in that same period.

The totals as of now, Frey finds, are that, since he started tracking the data back in late March, 1,014 counties carried by Trump have entered the high-covid category. By contrast, a total of 350 Clinton counties have done so.

That seems more lopsided than it is, because Trump carried far more counties than Clinton did. (She ran up huge totals in much more populous counties.)

Nonetheless, it’s a threshold of sorts that more than 1,000 counties carried by Trump have now become, at one point or another, high-covid ones.
Now, the battleground states. I asked Frey to break down how the new high-covid counties carried by Trump are distributed in the states that will likely decide the presidential race.

Here’s what he found. In the last three weeks, of those 548 Trump counties that have newly entered the high-covid category, here’s how some are distributed in those key states:

  • Florida: 15 new Trump counties
  • Michigan: 17 new Trump counties
  • Pennsylvania: 11 new Trump counties
  • Wisconsin: 8 new Trump counties
  • North Carolina: 26 new Trump counties
  • Arizona: 3 new Trump counties
  • Georgia: 40 new Trump counties


That’s a total of 80 Trump counties in battleground states, and 120 if you include Georgia (which will probably not be a battleground, but new polls show it surprisingly close).

This means coronavirus could still shift presidential politics in ways we didn’t expect.

“This is moving into parts of the swing states that really haven’t seen the pandemic as much,” Frey told me. “And this is likely to continue.”
Trump won the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by incredibly tight margins, and, as Frey noted, those margins were squeezed out in more rural and small metro counties. Some of these are now the high-covid ones, Frey said.

“These are places that could make the difference in the presidential campaign,” Frey told me. “People who were buying into Trump’s message that they were safe are going to take a second look as they see this happening in their own areas.”
“Those margins in the small counties helped put him over the top,” Frey added.

All of this also strikes deeply at another one of Trump’s most cherished projects. Once Trump finally accepted that the pandemic was a very serious crisis — or at least a dire threat to his reelection bid — he began suggesting to his parts of the country, in one way or another, that he could wall off diseased and depraved blue America to protect them from the pandemic, building on a story he has told throughout his presidency.

As Ronald Brownstein puts it in a piece detailing that effort, even amid “the nation’s most wrenching crisis since the Depression and World War II,” Trump has throughout been “pursuing a form of secession from common purpose.”

Coronavirus has breached Trump’s wall, even if Trump cannot yet bring himself to admit it, or accept what it might mean.
 
Honestly, till this day, I think he still refuses to believe that it was race.

Obama? I'm sure he knows it was a factor. Politics had shifted by then anyway so there was more vitriol, but being a democrat and black put folks over the edge. This one white girl I interacted with on DailyKos and social media said she thought that was why the attacks against black men were so prevalent. She said racists were using black men as a proxy for Obama. They couldn't get to him, so they targeted the next best thing.
 
Honestly, till this day, I think he still refuses to believe that it was race.
Obama? I'm sure he knows it was a factor. Politics had shifted by then anyway so there was more vitriol, but being a democrat and black put folks over the edge. This one white girl I interacted with on DailyKos and social media said she thought that was why the attacks against black men were so prevalent. She said racists were using black men as a proxy for Obama. They couldn't get to him, so they targeted the next best thing.

He knows it was a factor, he doesn't want to admit it was the factor. He thinks it's the minority of the republican party, it's not. It's the vast majority.

I get it. I'm mixed like Obama. You think you can stride both worlds but you can't. They don't want you. You're not going to impress them no later how much smarter and better than them you are. Obama has lived his life in the bubble of educated people. He dealt with conservatives who read Edmund Burke. I spent my life around working class whites, "the base". Race is the factor for up to 90% of the party. He's in denial. He's used to being able to win people over with words. These people only know small words.
 
I think it was Ta-Nehisi Coates who had an entire article on this exact thing. Obama never had the experiences with cacs that most other Black people have so he honestly believes that he can use logic/reason to sway them...

I don't think I've read that one yet. I'll look it up. If it's not Coates, it might be Dyson. There is a lot of truth to that. Obama grew up in Hawaii, a very diverse state. One thing I know about Hawaii is the natives keep the white people in their place. I've met a few white people who lived there and everyone complained about the way they were treated by the locals. In Hawaii, they're the minority so they're forced to accommodate others, they must be more tolerate. Then he went away to the top universities in America, dealing with smarter than average people. People who can find their own way.

I think of my own experiences. I grew up in a black environment, occasionally mixing with white people. I disagreed with a lot of what my friends thought about white people. It wasn't until I started in an environment that was full of working class white people that I saw it. It wasn't something I read or heard on CNN, it was what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.

America is hopelessly divided now and it's their fault. It's because of their fear and sense of entitlement. All white people think they're entitled to a nice middle class life style. They believe it's their birthright and they just have to do the minimum to achieve it.
 
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This is data as of May 13th. Do you know how you can tell a brotha has a lot of time on his hand? :lol: This that furlough time!

The curve for total deaths of the entire U.S. is not rising at a higher slope. We've also had six consecutive days with deaths under 2,000. North Carolina deaths are growing at a faster rate than the U.S., unfortunately.

deaths-0513-without NY.png


Here is a seven-day moving average of daily deaths in the United States. The yellow lines show that the daily deaths are decreasing, but the daily deaths for NC are increasing.

deaths-0513-Daily.png


You can see in the regression line below the projected deaths for the next seven days.

deaths-0513b.png


Here is the corresponding table to show projected deaths for the next seven days for the United States.

5/14
5/15
5/16
5/17
5/18
5/19
5/20
85,106​
86,437​
87,768​
89,100​
90,431​
91,762​
93,093​

Confirmed cases in the United States continues to grow as expected, but there is a decrease in daily confirmed cases. This is largely due to NY still being the outlier.

cases-withoutNY-0513.png


We can see the difference in the trend of the confirmed cases by looking at the moving averages. The top yellow line for the United States and the daily cases are going downward. The bottom yellow line is for the United States daily cases without New York and the line is a little flatter.

cases-withoutNY-0513 -daily.png


Since I have been working with QGIS, we can visualize the hot spots of confirmed cases in the United States by looking at percent increases between May 6th to May 13th. This map clearly shows the hot spots are in the south and midwestern states. This is largely Trump's base.

United States Cases Increase - 0513.png


Since I am a North Carolinian, the final maps give us a closer look at confirmed cases and percent increases. My area (Guilford County) is a hot spot with 683 confirmed cases and 44 deaths.

NC Confirmed Cases - 0513.png

North Carolina Cases Increase - 0513.png
 









TM-graphic-pg12-v2.jpg
 
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