Republicans are more unified than ever in pushing policies that hurt red states: op-ed

Writing in The Washington Post this Monday, Greg Sargent says that in the wake of every Senate Republican voting against President Biden's $1.9 trillion rescue package, it makes one wonder the answer to the age-old question: "Why do so many conservative Americans vote against their own economic interests?"

Sargent cites new analysis from "three leading political scientists" who analyzed the "political economy" of red states compared to blue states and found that we're "in the grip of a paradox."

"Even as areas that vote Republican continue falling behind blue America economically — helping widen those oft-discussed regional inequalities between cosmopolitan and outlying areas — GOP elites everywhere are growing more committed to an increasingly uniform and regressive agenda that does little to address the problem," Sargent writes.

Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist who co-authored the analysis, told The Washington Post that red states are falling behind, but Republicans who represent them "have gotten more unified on an economic agenda that hurts the people who live there."

Hacker's analysis goes on to say that blue state are "increasingly buoyed by the knowledge economy" while red states struggle "to find a viable growth model for the twenty-first century."

Read the full article over at The Washington Post.