The other day my daughter forwarded a text from her friend. She had asked her friend how her parents were doing, and her friend wrote that her Dad would be fine, since he’s a Republican. (A joke – she’s pretty liberal.) Well, apparently her dad isn’t the only one.
This is from a study by some Stanford political scientists [pdf] (via Kevin Drum). The top graph shows changes in movement by county — blue is more change, red is less. The study authors claim to have controlled for other variables. Plus, in your heart, you know it’s right.
Everyone wants to be so fucking special, and today’s Republican party delivers. Republicans are high on a supply of unearned Supreme Court justices, a packed judiciary, their own media outlet that gasses them up daily, a Senate that will tilt their way for the forseeable future, and, of course, Donald J. Trump. It’s no surprise that they think they’re immune to the virus, because they’re certainly immune to democracy.
germy
germy
Jeffro
Would like to point out that the much- and often-rightly- maligned NYT has an excellent series of op-eds up today, noting in detail how the fallout from the coronavirus means we must work to build The America We Need.
Excerpt:
Ivan X
I’ve read the above post and stared at those maps three times and I just don’t know what any if it means. Movement of what? People? The virus? State legislative action? I don’t understand.
MattF
It’s not going to be visible for a while. Low-density areas don’t have much testing, eventually deaths from ‘pneumonia’ will be a few times greater than normal when and if the data becomes available.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@Ivan X: Movement of people.
evodevo
Kevin says he doesn’t take much pleasure in what the data says…sorry, Kevin, I say KARMA….
schrodingers_cat
@Ivan X: Same here. I have no fucking clue what the maps are supposed to show.
Nelle
@Ivan X: a rough look at the original article suggests that the two maps see a correlation between staying put (blue) and political affiliation with Democrats, as well as visiting, or not observing stay in place, with Republicans. Catchy. But I need to go look at the study referred to to get more out of it.
ThresherK
Tangent: Curious about population density in RealMerika’s effect on this whole thing, like the non-anecdotal evidence of air pollution clearing over big cities in India, etc.
I live in
Sodom and Gomorrahan Eastern Elite-adjacent suburb, and the number of miles I need to drive to look for toilet paper in 5 stores is barely more than the trip to the nearest store.schrodingers_cat
@Nelle: Northwestern Maine is mostly forested there are hardly any towns, why is that region yellow? Hardly anyone but foresters who harvest trees for paper go there.
TheTruffle
I really hope November is a blue tsunami.
That said, those red areas tend to be more rural, yes?
Ray Ingles
Note that rural (and therefore Republican-skewed) areas are a lot more spread out and have a lot lower density of things like grocery stores and pharmacies. Not a “food desert” as such, but a lot of the same properties. Even people trying to limit their movements are going to have to drive further than someone in the suburbs.
https://xkcd.com/1138/
Lee
As others pointed out it might be more of a rural thing.
It also might be a education/income thing. My red county in North Texas is blue on movement. We are highly educated and high income
We also have a lot of instacart and grubhub options
scav
@Ray Ingles: Have to keep reading to see how they (attempt) to do it, but they say they they’ve controlled for density.
bemused
@schrodingers_cat:
Northeast MN is quite similar, forests, lakes, small towns. We have our share of RWNJ’s and stupid people in general. Over time our district changed from solid DFL to leaning right.
david
So, the charts show that people who live in rural areas, faced with supply shortages,
may have to travel even more to secure said supplies?
I’m shocked.
Oh, and visit the online grocery sites. See the high % of “out of stock”? Yet, you can
find limited supplies in the actual brick-and-mortar stores. So, yes, you have to get
out and travel, and often travel even more due to restrictions on how much of an
item you are allowed to purchase in one visit.
This wasn’t the gotcha post the OP thought it would be. Be better.
kindness
You can’t fix stupid. I work in a hospital in a red/purple part of California. Some of the folks that work here have convinced themselves this is all overblown and really do believe it’s just to hurt Trump’s re-election. Not my friends mind you, just people I have overheard talking. You can’t fix stupid.
So long as we are actually able to vote in November I feel we got this. Trump is a one termer. I worry that Republicans will see the mood of the country and see that they were able to monkey wrench the Wisconsin vote and decide to go all out doing the same nationally. The Roberts court won’t help us. We’re on our own.
khead
I’m seeing a lot of right leaning rural folks I know starting up the “can’t we all just come together without politics and criticizing?” routine. That’s when I know they are starting to have some doubts. See also, Iraq in 2005 and Katrina in 2006.
lee
@kindness: Yep. I’ve still got some in my FB feed that are saying this is no worse than the flu and we all need to get back to work. In the letters to the editor in the Dallas Morning News, you can see the talking points have been distributed with how we should get back to work.
lee
@khead: I didn’t think of it that way but that is a really good point. I’m also seeing that popup in my FB feed.
WereBear
@khead:
Dang, you are right. Cheers me up a tad.
cleek
NY has more cases than any place in the world – more than Italy or Spain.
maybe NYers shouldn’t be sneering quite so much?
r€nato
natural selection is gonna select, naturally. I got no problem with deliberate, abject stupidity being lethal. About goddamn time, actually.
scav
They seem to using units of visits to POIs (places of interest, e.g. stores, restaurants, hospitals, bars, public places, etc) based on “numerous mobile applications” data and thus not measured in miles. The POI data seems to include the number of visitors that came from a given census block over the unit of time so there is access to some milage based analysis as well.
There’s also information about how many (call em phones, that should be the bulk) leave their census block over a period. The size of the block reflects the density of the area, so . . . that could sorta wok. But I’ll assume there’ll be some background studies of how well behaved that is.
Wandering Logic
Look at Indiana and Ohio: “red” states with small amount of movement. Then look at the strip of “blue” counties across the south. Those are rural counties often with majority black populations, (because that’s where the most productive land for growing cotton is). So on a county basis the correlation between voting and movement seems very weak. What seems stronger is ruralness vs movement, and, perhaps, movement of blue-collar workers (who can’t work from home) in states with weaker lock-downs.
So what I think in my heart is true (that Republicans are sociopaths who want to spread Corona Virus to all their neighbors), is not actually supported by these maps.
Citizen_X
Target acquired. Fire for effect.
Villago Delenda Est
I join the “I have no fucking clue what this is supposed to tell me” posters. This makes NO SENSE AT ALL.
The Moar You Know
@cleek: Wait a month. The lung plague has just shown up in the Delhi slums and the favelas in Brazil. It’s gonna burn through those places like wildfire, and with that population, the death rate won’t be the current 5%. More like 10-15%, and that’s optimistic.
scav
They’ve also got temporal data on the trip behavior, meaning they can track the changes over time as the virus advanced. They can see where the patterns of behavior were similar early on and diverged later. They also seem to have baseline data from 2019 for comparison.
zhena gogolia
@germy:
My husband and I talk about this every day. Both our mothers were Depression kids and saved EVERYTHING. I reacted against it but he maintained the Depression mentality. So he’s adjusting much better than I am right now. I think what that quotation misses is that the stuff people used to do because Depression is the same stuff we need to do right now!
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Not a Depression kid but growing up in India means I save and reuse everything. Husband kitteh is more obsessive about this than I am.
Capri
@zhena gogolia: Along those same lines – my mother was born 5 years after the height of the 1919 pandemic, but her childhood was very much shaped by it. She talked about how fear of infectious disease guided a lot of how she was raised as a child.
The Moar You Know
@khead: Damn, you read my mind. I was thinking the same thing a couple of days ago. But I’ll go you one better; it’s not that they have doubts. They rarely do. It’s that they know they’re going to lose hard this election. Sort of a preemptive plea for mercy.
Which Dems always show them. And that’s a problem. We need to stop doing things that benefit their voters and not ours when we win.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
It’s amazing how long a sliver of soap will last!
germy
scav
Basically, there’s a lot more in the paper than a flyby look at two maps will reveal. It’ll take more time to evaluate than the skim I’ve managed so far.
The Moar You Know
@lee: “More people are going to die from this economic disaster than this disease will ever kill” is the key phrase.
I find this interesting. There’s a huge, unseen (for now) split between the Chamber of Commerce/small business owner bloc of the GOP, which is losing every last dime they have and will be beggared for life because of the shutdown, and the Trump bloc of the GOP, which is only concerned with Trump’s poll numbers and his re-election prospects. Sadly, probably not exploitable. That CoC/SBA bloc will never, ever, ever vote for a Dem even if their alternative is being reduced to living under a freeway bridge and roasting sparrows on a curtain rod.
bemused
@zhena gogolia:
Ha, my spouse has also absorbed some of his parents’ Depression era characteristics. I have told him a few times that it’s way past time to let that appliance, tool, pots and pans, you name it, go, not like his parents who hung on to things until they absolutely couldn’t wring any use out of them anymore.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@cleek: We test more than South Korea, per capita. Our testing, driven by our private and public labs, is much better than most of the rest of the country. So our case count per capita will be higher than other states that aren’t testing. Also, Upstate (Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo) has a much lower case per capita count than NYC and surrounds. So, from where I sit, upstate is doing well. We’re also blue in the top map, which as others have noted, is about trips to Points of Interest (POI) versus baseline, so it is adjusted for rural residents needing to make longer trips to the grocery store. It may not be adjusted for supply shortages causing more trips, as others have mentioned, but if you’re isolating in place you make fewer trips to other POIs.
In other words, I’m not complacent – a lot of people here are dying – but I’m fine pointing out that Republican areas of the country aren’t taking this seriously. We’re taking it seriously.
PenAndKey
@Ivan X: The maps are showing a strong correlation between GOP voting patterns and how closely an area follows “stay in place” principles. Without looking at the data being used to draw that conclusion I can’t say one way or the other if it’s valid, but given that I live in a liberal town but work an essential job an hour from there in a rural county I can definitely confirm that in my neck of Wisconsin the rural areas have more traffic.
Some of that is the fact that our grocery stores and essentials are located in towns and can be up to an hour away, but not all of it.
Ohio Mom
Kevin Drum loves number-crunching and making charts, and he has a good track record of making sense of raw data.
If he thinks these maps have something to tell us, I’m going to give it a listen.
Chris Johnson
@The Moar You Know:
This is exactly what you see previous to things like dotcom busts and so on, anything that’s a giant bubble of madness that is unjustifiable. The final narrative just before the whole thing blows up is, ‘This will never change because the people making it happen are so completely irrational that they will all, uniformly, keep making it happen’.
That’s the point where you get the hell out of the market, when the only argument is ‘people are so crazy that this will never fail!’
Same thing here. The attempted narrative is, ‘people will NEVER abandon Trump and the Republicans’. They’re supposed to stay loyal to the death because people making that argument are so incapable of seeing the opponent’s point of view that the arguer falls back on ‘they are starkly, incomprehensibly insane and there’s no logic or reason to any of it, therefore they will stick with their evil to the death’.
Of course, this is crap: even if you think they are totally insane, there’s only that 27% or so of those that you think are utterly insane who will truly stick to the death. The others will be shaken loose by the impact of reality.
Doesn’t mean they will join you: maybe they will go full Nazi and kill their leaders and then try to kill all of China. You have no guarantee they’re gonna become liberals, but they will be shaken loose from their loyalties to Trump and the Republicans.
Just Chuck
These states are an existential public health threat, and if we actually had a federal government, something might get done about it. The leopards are demonstrably eating faces now. Problem is, they’ll get around to eating _our_ faces too.
Jinchi
The chart doesn’t compare city folk to country folk. It shows the change in travel for every county compared to itself between the week of January 26th (well before the shelter-in-place ordinances started) and the week beginning March 22nd (well after).
Gvg
@khead: Tell them, “sure, just agree with everything I say now”, just like you used to tell us. Anthrax and tire rims.
Robby-D
Correlation vs. causation. I think what you’re seeing here is that it’s easier to stay put if you’re in an urban centre. I suspect that republican vs democrat is an influence, but probably less so than the geography and demographics and availability of delivery services (or even the difference in delay, same-day vs. 4-day delivery can shape whether you do curbside pickup or order it from Amazon).
PenAndKey
@Robby-D: It’s not about staying put, but about changes in travel patterns. I grew up five miles from the nearest “town” (grand total population 550) and other than essential supplies, groceries and work there isn’t anything you need to travel for. You’ll notice that Wisconsin, most of which is just as rural as the deep red spots in the southern states, is blue. That’s entirely because of the stay-at-home order in effect. The yokels around here don’t have a choice, because all the bars, restaurants, and hangouts they usually drive into town for are shut down.
BruceFromOhio
Cry me a river.
Another Scott
Dead thread, but Colin Woodard has an interesting explanation:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/04/09/how-americas-earliest-colonists-dictate-todays-coronavirus-response/
Cheers,
Scott.
No One You Know
I wonder what would happen if we could compare the Republican gerrymandered map projections for, say, North Carolina or Pennsylvania, with actual COVID-19 deaths in the same states in mid-May older June.
There’s a visual that might show how fatal Republican policies are to the lives of “people like us.”