Washington Post reporter Philip Bump on Friday compared states that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 with states that voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 and found it was "impossible" to separate politics from pandemic outcomes.
In a chart posted on his Twitter account, Bump showed how much Biden-voting states have diverged from Trump-voting states ever since vaccines started rolling out late last year, and he found that blue states are now doing significantly better than they were a year ago at this time, while red states are doing significantly worse.
Elaborating on this in a lengthy Washington Post analysis, Bump makes a case that the is a direct correlation with political leanings and pandemic outcomes.
"Republicans have been less concerned about the virus, less likely to embrace practices such as masking, more likely to express opposition to vaccination and (obviously) voted more heavily for Trump," he writes. "And now, after vaccinations have been made broadly available, states that are seeing the most new cases and deaths are states that are less heavily vaccinated and were more supportive of Trump last year. All of that is obviously and provably true, making it much harder to assert that politics is not playing any role."