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Until just the other day, Republicans and conservative media loved, just loved talking about the price of gasoline. Indeed, Remember how cheap gas used to be under Trump? became a sort of all-purpose answer to everything. Is there now overwhelming evidence that the former president conspired in a violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 election? Real America doesnt care about the January 6th Committee. Gas is over $5 a gallon! declared Representative Jim Jordan.

But now gas prices are falling. Theyre down more than 50 cents a gallon at the pump; wholesale prices, whose changes normally show up later in retail prices, are down even more, suggesting that prices will keep falling for at least the next few weeks. And theres a palpable sense of panic on Fox News, which has been reduced to whining about how the White House is taking a victory lap.

Actually, from what I can see, Biden administration officials are being remarkably restrained in pointing out the good news (which is probably a result of a slowing global economy). The larger point, however, is that Republican politicians focus on gas prices is profoundly stupid. And if its coming back to bite them, thats just poetic justice.

Why is focusing on gas prices stupid? Let me count the ways.

First, while presidential policy can have big effects on many things, the cost of filling your gas tank isnt one of them. For the most part, gasoline prices reflect the price of crude oil and crude prices are set on world markets, which is one reason inflation has soared around the world, not just in the United States. Government spending in the Biden administrations early months may have contributed to overall U.S. inflation we can argue about how much but has hardly anything to do with gas prices.

Second, while gas was indeed cheap in 2020, it was cheap for a very bad reason: Global demand for oil was depressed because the world economy was reeling from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Third, even before the pandemic struck, gas prices were unsustainably low.

Little-known fact: Prices at the pump plunged during President Barack Obamas second term, falling from about $3.70 a gallon in mid-2014 around $4.50 in 2022 dollars to $2.23 on the eve of the 2016 election. News reports at the time marveled at Obamas diffidence about claiming credit.

What happened? Mostly a boom in fracking, which increased U.S. oil production so much that it drove prices down around the world. As it turned out, however, that production boom didnt make financial sense. Energy companies borrowed huge sums to invest in new drilling but never generated enough revenue to justify the cost. The fracking industry lost hundreds of billions even before the pandemic struck.

So high gas prices werent President Bidens fault, and given the disappearance of the forces that used to keep gas cheap, its hard to think of any policy short of creating a global depression that would bring prices down to $2 a gallon, or even $3 a gallon. Not that Republicans are offering any real policy proposals anyway.

But the G.O.P. nonetheless went for the cheap shot of trying to make the midterm elections largely about prices at the pump. And this focus on gas is now giving the party a bellyache, as gas prices come down.

It is, after all, hard to spend month after month insisting that Biden deserves all the blame for rising gas prices, then deny him any credit when they come down. The usual suspects are, of course, trying, but its not likely to go well.

Some right-wing commentators are trying to pivot to a longer view, pointing out that gas prices are still much higher than they were in 2020. This happens to be true. But so much of their messaging has depended on voter amnesia on their supporters not remembering what was really going on in 2020 that I have my doubts about how effective this line will be.

More broadly, many Wall Street analysts expect to see a sharp drop in inflation over the next few months, reflecting multiple factors, from falling used car prices to declining shipping costs, not just gas prices. Market expectations of near-term inflation have come way down.

If the analysts and the markets are right, were probably headed for a period in which inflation headlines are better than the true state of affairs; its not clear whether underlying inflation has come down much, if at all. But thats not an argument Republicans, who have done all they can to dumb down the inflation debate, are well placed to make.

This has obvious implications for the midterm elections. Republicans have been counting on inflation to give them a huge victory, despite having offered no explanation of what theyd do about it. But if you look at the generic ballot which probably doesnt yet reflect falling gas prices rather than Bidens approval rating, the midterms look surprisingly competitive.

Maybe real Americans do care about violent attacks on democracy, overturning Roe v. Wade and so on after all.

If we continue to get good news on inflation, November may look very different from what everyone has been expecting.

Go here to read the rest:
Opinion | Why Republicans Are Having Gas Pains - The New York Times

GRAND HAVEN, MI The Ottawa County Republican Party Executive Committee has censured six sitting Republican county commissioners in the latest public bout of party in-fighting.

The party leadership team alleges the commissioners in question have encouraged Democrats to vote in the Republican primary.

The Ottawa County GOP Executive Committee voted last week to censure any Republican elected official or candidate who encourages Democrats to vote in the hotly-contested Aug. 2 Republican Primary.

In doing so, they censured six Republican incumbents on the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners: Board Chair Matt Fenske, Roger Bergman, Board Vice Chair Al Dannenberg, Greg DeJong, Randy Meppelink and Phil Kuyers.

The Ottawa GOP Executive Committee in a news release claimed these sitting members have been publicly embracing Democrat interference in the Republican primary.

The committee further alleged that some of those commissioners were endorsed by two, unnamed political groups with apparent ties to George Soros that have a goal to elect the most liberal person in races where Democrats have a slim chance to win.

Ottawa County is often regarded as a Republican stronghold in the state. Only one of the countys 11-member board is a Democrat.

Soros, a Jewish billionaire and financier of progressive causes and candidates, is often invoked in antisemitic tropes as a symbol of Jewish wealth and power, the American Jewish Committee said in a Tuesday, July 19, statement in response to the Ottawa County GOP.

This antisemitic language has no place in our political discourse. It should never be normalized, American Jewish Committee officials said. We call upon the Michigan Republican Party and Ottawa County Republican Party to immediately refute these statements.

The six, censured commissioners are among a group of eight incumbent Republican Ottawa County commissioners being challenged in the Aug. 2 primary by fellow Republicans endorsed by new political action committee Ottawa Impact.

That group was born out of the COVID-19 health orders that saw mask mandates in schools in Ottawa County and elsewhere in the state by order of local health department directors.

In a joint press release sent out Saturday, July 16, the censured commissioners called themselves longtime and traditional Republicans who have dedicated ourselves throughout our political careers to making an impact, having integrity, and embracing the common good.

As longstanding members of the Republican Party, we support the values and policies which have made Ottawa County strong, the joint statement reads. We are disappointed that a small, vocal minority has infiltrated the Ottawa County GOP to serve its own narrow political agenda rather than address Ottawa County as a whole and serve everybody.

They didnt specifically address the claims made by the executive committee.

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Read the original:
6 Republican Ottawa County commissioners censured in latest bout of party in-fighting - MLive.com

Party registration can be a lagging indicator of political change, but recent changes in some states are bringing registration more in line with actual voting.

Republicans have taken the voter registration edge in states such as Florida and West Virginia somewhat recently, and Kentucky flipped to them just last week. Democrats have built bigger leads in several blue states.

Democrats hold a substantial national lead in party registration, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that a number of states, many of which are Republican-leaning, do not register voters by party. A little less than two-thirds of the states register voters by party (31 states plus the District of Columbia).

Overall, Republicans have made gains over Democrats in 19 states since summer 2018, when we last looked at these trends, while Democrats have made gains over Republicans in 12 states and the District of Columbia. There are more registered Democrats than Republicans in 17 of these states plus DC, and more registered Republicans than Democrats in 14.

Last fall in Florida, something downright historic occurred. For the first time in the states modern history, the number of registered Republicans surpassed the number of registered Democrats. It has added an element of congruency to Florida politics, where Republicans were already dominating elections up and down the ballot. And it has provided more momentum for the GOP as it seeks to convert Florida from a battleground state into a reliably red one.

For Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the GOP success was also a personal one. He had made the idea of flipping Florida a significant goal of his administration and put $2 million into seeing that it happened. When it did, one of the prime beneficiaries was DeSantis, whose reputation on the national scene as an effective party-builder was enhanced.

For generations, party registration had been notoriously out of sync with election results. Across the late 20th century, Republican presidential winners such as Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush won landslide victories by carrying states with significant Democratic registration pluralities.

But those days are fading fast, with a dramatic shift in particular occurring in the once solid Democratic South. For decades now, Republicans have dominated the region electorally, but it is only now that long healthy Democratic registration advantages are finally evaporating. In the last few years, the number of registered Republicans has finally surpassed the number of registered Democrats not only in Florida, but also in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. (The Mountain State is not technically Southern, though it has become very Republican in recent years just like many Southern states.)

Kentucky flipped less than a week ago, on July 15. A Democratic registration lead of more than 185,000 in mid-2020 is now a Republican advantage of 2,491 registered voters 1,612,060 to 1,609,569. Meanwhile, a couple of other Southern states with party registration, North Carolina and Louisiana, are also trending Republican, but Democrats retain a registration edge in both. The Tar Heel State did see unaffiliated voters surpass Democrats recently, though.

Why does all this matter? For a long time, party registration totals have been viewed as a lagging indicator of a states political evolution, changing more slowly than dominance at the ballot box. As a consequence, registration data has sometimes not been very predictive of how a state would vote. Yet now, as states switch from Democratic to Republican across the South, the data is becoming more reflective of actual election outcomes.

Party flips in registration are both dramatic and historic events that stoke Republican momentum, while dispiriting Democrats. Florida Republican leaders hope that the partys expanding voter base will not only help fuel a big victory for the GOP across the Sunshine State this fall but also help provide a solid presidential win in 2024.

Sources: Editions of America Votes (CQ Press, a division of SAGE) for party registration totals from 2008 through 2020. The 2022 figures are from the websites of state election authorities in Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

The Republican breakthrough in Florida was based on some dramatic changes within the state. At the time of Trumps election in November 2016, Democrats held the registration advantage in 30 of Floridas 67 counties. By this spring, Democrats led in just 15 counties.

Over the last 6 years, Republicans flipped a number of counties in rural Florida, especially in the northern part of the state near Alabama and Georgia. But the GOP also gained the registration lead in several rather populous counties in central Florida, such as Pinellas (St. Petersburg), Polk (Lakeland), and Volusia (Daytona Beach). In addition, Republicans trimmed the Democratic registration advantage in heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County, from 220,000 in 2016 to less than 155,000 this spring.

Yet it was not all bad news for the Democrats. Since 2016, they have expanded their registration lead in Orange County (Orlando) and Duval County (Jacksonville). Still, that has not been good enough to keep pace with the Republicans, as Florida Democrats find themselves in the unusual position of playing catch up in the statewide registration battle.

As Florida shows signs of growing redder, GOP registration gains in another critical battleground state, Pennsylvania, show Democrats with a significant lead in spite of a reduced margin. The Democratic registration advantage was about 550,000 in 2006, surged past 1 million when Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008, and is now back to a pre-Obama lead of barely 540,000.

Republicans have posted significant registration gains in western Pennsylvania, once a hotbed of blue-collar Democrats. Since 2016, 4 counties in the region have flipped to the GOP, including Cambria (Johnstown) and Westmoreland, a populous county outside Pittsburgh.

Meanwhile, Democrats have expanded their domination of the once-Republican Philadelphia suburbs. With the registration advantage in Chester County switching during the Trump era from Republican to Democratic, the latter now holds the upper hand in party registration in all 4 suburban counties. The Democrats greatest advantage is in Montgomery County, where this summer there are now nearly 100,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. It is a far cry from a generation ago, when Montgomery was the crown jewel of the state Republican Party.

In 2020, there was already a considerable amount of congruency between voter registration and the presidential election results. Of the 31 party registration states (and the District of Columbia), the 2 categories were in sync in 25 states. The exceptions were 5 Southern-oriented states won by Donald J. Trump that at the time of the 2020 election still had more registered Democrats than Republicans: Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and West Virginia. The other state that went against the grain was Arizona, where registered Republicans continue to outnumber Democrats even as Joe Biden carried the state by 10,457 votes. Given the recent flips, it would not be surprising if the nationwide congruency rate in the 2024 presidential election drew even closer to unanimous.

For years, Democrats were largely able to limit the Republican registration advance in the South to incremental gains. Yet since the eve of Trumps election in 2016, the GOPs ability to couple both registration advantages with election victories has begun to happen quickly, as shown in Table 1.

Many political observers abhor Trumps high-voltage, sharp-edged brand of politics. But his energy and bite now runs through the Republican Party and has arguably been a factor in the GOPs recent registration surge. Yet Trump is not the only reason this is happening. For a generation, there has been a steady stream of Southern white Democrats converting to the Republican Party. And it is a fact of life that numerous other yellow dog Democrats have been dying off, leaving states across the region increasingly dependent on Black voters for their viability.

A prime example is Louisiana, a state where voter registration is tallied by both party and race. In the era of Trump (from late 2016 to the present), the white share of Democratic registrations in the Bayou State has dropped by nearly 25%, from 563,673 in November 2016 to 425,799 this June. Meanwhile, the number of registered Black Democrats in Louisiana since 2016 has stayed roughly the same, just north of 700,000. As a consequence, the Black share of the states Democratic registrations has climbed to 60% (from 55% in late 2016), a change based almost entirely on a shrinking white percentage of the Democratic electorate.

On the other hand, it is an entirely different story among Louisiana Republicans. For all practical purposes, the partys registration numbers are racially homogenous, with nearly 940,000 white voters and barely 20,000 Black voters on the GOP rolls. In percentage terms, the Louisiana Republican electorate is 94% white and 2% Black, with the remainder classified racially as Other.

Notes: Totals are presented as they are listed on the state election website, with the exception of roughly 10 states where both the number of active and inactive voters are posted. In these, only the tally of active voters is listed here. The leader in each region is noted in bold and italics.

The following states register voters by party:

Northeast: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, plus the District of Columbia.

South: Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma.

Midwest: Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota.

West: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming.

Source: State election websites.

Since 2016, party registration changes outside the South have been a mixed bag. Republicans have succeeded in trimming Democratic registration advantages in several battleground states, including Nevada and Pennsylvania. In the former, there were nearly 100,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans at the time of Trumps election; now, the Democratic margin in Nevada is only a little over 50,000. In Pennsylvania, registered Democrats outpaced Republicans by more than 900,000 in late 2016; this July, the Democratic advantage stands at about 540,000.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, the Republican registration edge has more than doubled in size over the Democrats since 2016, from 33,000 to nearly 85,000, while both the GOP and the Democrats have surpassed the group of voters who are not registered with a party. In the process, Trump has carried the state twice by almost 10 percentage points, and essentially removed it from the ranks of battleground states. It is a good bet that the recent Republican gains in Iowa are a factor in the national Democratic Partys consideration of stripping the state of its traditional lead-off spot on the presidential nominating calendar.

Another state historically at the front of the primary calendar, New Hampshire, saw Democratic registrants surpass Republican ones around the time of the 2020 presidential primary, although undeclared voters still hold a plurality. Registered Democrats also recently surpassed independents to become the plurality of registrants in Maine and New Jersey, while independents are now ahead of Democrats in Oregon, even as the Democratic edge over Republicans has expanded.

There also has been a Democratic countersurge in states in the Amtrak corridor from Washington, D.C. to New York City, as well as in parts of the West. Taking out Pennsylvania, the states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, plus the District have seen the combined Democratic registration advantage in these jurisdictions swell by more than a half million since the middle of 2018

Out west in Colorado, the Democratic registration lead has widened by more than 100,000 since late 2016. But nothing matches California, where a Democratic registration advantage of 3.7 million has exploded to 5 million since Trumps election.

The party registration states are mainly on the 2 coasts with 11 (and the District) in the Northeast and 10 in the West. There are only 4 party registration states in the Midwest, all agrarian ones west of the Mississippi River, and 6 in the South. Arkansas is a hybrid when it comes to registration. The state gives voters the chance of registering by party, but nearly 90% of the total number of Razorback State registrants have declined the option.

It should be no surprise that because most of the states that register by party are concentrated in the most Democratic regions of the country, Democrats held a 9-percentage point lead over the Republicans (39% to 30%) in the nationwide tally of registered voters this summer.

Most of the rest are independents, a growth stock over the last generation as trust in the two major parties has faltered. Yet while the number of independents approaches 30% of all registered voters, there are those involved in politics who feel that percentage is inflated. It has been estimated that the number of pure independents is closer to 10%, with the others actually leaning to one party or the other.

Note: To be sure, there is something of an apples and oranges element in this table in comparing the national party registration percentages since 2000. From 2000 through 2016, the proportions in some states were based on a combination of active and inactive voters. This year, the author decided a truer measurement was to include only active registered voters in the 10 or so states where there was also the choice to add the inactive voters. Still, the accent is on the trend line since 2000 with the proportion of registered Democratic and Republican voters down since 2000, and registered independent voters up. Percentages do not add to 100 due to the exclusion of the small percentage of registered third party and miscellaneous voters. Ind. stands for independent.

Sources: Richard Wingers newsletter, Ballot Access News, for election-eve party registration numbers in 2000, 2008, and 2016; the websites of state election authorities for totals as of July 2022.

Setting the independents aside, there are currently almost 11.4 million more registered Democrats than Republicans in the party registration states. Yet that large edge has been fashioned in only 5 of them California (where there are 5 million more registered Democrats than Republicans), New York (with nearly 3.3 million more Democrats), Maryland (almost 1.25 million), Massachusetts (1 million), and New Jersey (with 1 million more Democrats than Republicans registered). In the remaining party registration states, the Democrats and Republicans have a similar aggregate number of voters.

Like other aspects of American politics, party registration is a moving target. Republicans in Florida, Oklahoma, and West Virginia have not just surpassed the Democrats in voter registration in recent years, they have blown by them. In Oklahoma, the GOP registration advantage is approaching 450,000. In Florida, it has surpassed 175,000. In West Virginia, the gap exceeds 60,000. All in all, it represents a new chapter in Southern politics, and by extension, the nation as a whole.

See Map 1 and Table 4 for the current registration tallies by state, and Table 5 for registration trends by state over the last couple of decades. This story concludes with a brief note on these data and how they were compiled.

Note: States often tally voter registration on a monthly basis (more on this at the end of the article). The methodology of counting registered voters varies by state, with some separating active from inactive registrants; we used active registrant counts whenever available. In Alaska, Undeclared voters are included with Inds. So too in Arkansas, where nearly 90% of all registered voters are listed as Optional. Inds. stand for independents, which can go by other names, such as Unaffiliated or No Party. I-D or I-R means that a state has a plurality of registered independents, with more registered Democrats than Republicans (D) or more registered Republicans than Democrats (R). Percentages do not always add to 100 due to rounding.

Source: State election websites

Note: The largest Democratic and Republican registration margins among the 5 data points are in bold. Party registration totals are based on the number of active voters in states where totals for both active and inactive voters are posted.

Sources: Election-eve party registration figures for 2000, 2008, and 2016 were compiled by Richard Winger and published in his bimonthly newsletter, Ballot Access News. The 2018 and 2022 data were compiled by the author from party registration numbers posted on state election websites.

For the individual citizen, there are two basic aspects to voting. First, there is registering to vote; then, there is the act of casting an election ballot. Traditionally, the focus is on the latter and the results it produces. Registering to vote can seem a bit murkier, for all practical purposes existing in a world of its own.

Altogether, 31 states plus the District of Columbia offer registration by party. Most are in the Northeast and the West, and include California and New York. The remaining 19 states that do not register by party are largely concentrated in the industrial Midwest and Deep South, plus Texas.

Sometimes it is difficult to compare one states registration figures with another. States purge their rolls of dead wood at their own pace, and in their own way. Some states publicly update their registration numbers on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis; in other states, it might be done every year or so.

A number of states report their totals in terms of active voters, those who participate in primaries and general elections on a regular basis. Yet there are also states that report the number of inactive voters, a disparate group that includes those who have died, left the state, or grown disinterested in politics.

In Kentucky, the secretary of states office recently listed the various reasons for being purged from their registration rolls. It reported that in March 2022, there were 6,881 voters removed 5,874 deceased voters, 613 felony convicts, 300 voters who moved out of state, 71 adjudged mentally incompetent, and 23 who voluntarily de-registered. The total of inactive registrants varies from state to state, but often runs about 10% to 20% the size of the number of actives.

The active totals are featured here from the 10 or so states where there is a choice to made in what party registration totals to use. Among the states that offer an explicit tally of active registrations are Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Nevada. Data from the other states are often not broken down between active and inactive voters on their election websites but are used here nonetheless.

The data above are all from the most recent reports we could find from state-level sources. Generally speaking, these states all updated their figures within the past couple of months. A few exceptions: Arizona last updated its numbers in April, New York in February, and Connecticut and Massachusetts last year.

Originally posted here:
The Republican Advance in the South and Other Party Registration Trends Sabato's Crystal Ball - UVA | Center for Politics

Downtown Central City, in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky.

(Photographs by David Kidd/Governing)

Trump won 74 percent of the 2020 vote in Muhlenberg County, where Greenville is the county seat. This represents a huge switch. Muhlenberg County has historically been dominated by Democrats and all of the countywide posts are still held by Democrats. It wasnt long ago that even the most conservative voters registered as Democrats, because there was practically nothing to vote for as a Republican during primary elections. Just for so many years, there were few Republicans and rarely, rarely a Republican candidate, says Harvey J. VanHook, vice chair of the county GOP.

He recalls that the first time he voted in the county, the clerk couldnt find his name, since she wasnt in the habit of looking at the list of registered Republicans. But Trump holds a special appeal to voters in parts of the country that feel left behind by big cities and the coasts, both culturally and economically. Thats certainly the case in Muhlenberg County.

Doug Thompson (left) had hoped to be the Republican candidate for county judge-executive in the fall.

Its not only economic issues that have pushed voters in Muhlenberg County, along with much of rural America, away from Democrats and into the arms of Republicans. Ive seen so many people that were strong Democrats but changed because they felt that Democrats were not Christian, says Greenville Mayor Jan Yonts. (Shes a Democrat but her office is nonpartisan.) They feel that Democrats are baby killers.

Along a commercial corridor in Central City, which is the most populous city in Muhlenberg County, a Baptist church is fronted by a 50-foot tall lighthouse with the name Jesus spelled out in enormous black letters along two sides. Churchgoers in Central City have plenty of other choices for places to worship. Religion makes a big impact here, says Jack Reno, who chairs the Muhlenberg County Democratic Party. Rural Kentucky is very much religion first, guns second.

Democratic county chair Jack Reno. Rural Kentucky is very much religion first, guns second.

Ive had a lot of discussions with my neighbor and he was actually surprised I was a Democrat, says Brittney Hernandez-Stevenson, the partys candidate for state House seat in the county. Some of the support that I think I would get, I may not, unless they pay attention to me as a person and the things Ive done, versus my party.

At times, this seems almost like a party strategy. Obviously, more people live in urban areas than rural the counties Biden won are home to 67 million more people than Trump counties and Democrats have seemed dismissive of the need to appeal to rural voters. The common refrain that demography is destiny (refers) to the misguided belief that any year now the swelling suburbs and urban centers will hit a tipping point enabling Democrats to overcome the lopsided votes from our declining rural communities, write Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward in their new book Dirt Road Revival, about the need for Democrats to compete in rural areas. (Maxmin is a Democratic state senator from a rural district in Maine and Woodward was her campaign manager.)

Theres hardly an economic or health indicator by which rural America doesnt lag, whether its opioid addiction or life expectancy. During the decade between the Great Recession and the start of the pandemic, nearly all the economic growth took place in a fairly small number of metropolitan areas, making rural residents feel that the recession had never ended. The much smaller number of Biden counties accounted for 70 percent of the nations economy at the time of the election. Being told to check your privilege when youre struggling naturally grates.

Religion is a big influence in rural Kentucky politics.

During his first run in 2016, Trump spoke directly to small-town concerns, promising to bring back coal and steel jobs. That didnt happen, and even before taking office Trumps transition team was talking about eliminating the Tennessee Valley Authority. But Trump certainly delivered on cultural issues a fact punctuated by the recent Supreme Court decision overturning abortion rights under Roe v. Wade.

There are plenty of counties in Kentucky that, like Muhlenberg, supported Democrats for president until recently, but now are overwhelmingly Republican. Elliott County, in the eastern part of the state, had never once voted Republican for president over its 144-year history, the longest streak in the nation but Trump took 75 percent of the vote there in 2020.

Theres a car driving around Muhlenberg County with a bumper sticker that says LGBT, only the L stands for liberty, the G for guns, the B for beer and the T for Trump. Perry OBannon, who works for the Greenville Street Department, sums up Trumps appeal succinctly. I was raised a Democrat, he says, and Trump, he didnt take no crap.

Brent Yonts lobbied officials with the TVA and the EPA to keep local coal operations open, but to no avail. As a Democrat, he took the blame, or enough of it to lose his seat. Yonts got blamed because (a coal-fired power plant) didnt get built, says Reno, the Democratic county chair. There was nothing a state rep could do about it because the EPA wasnt going to grant a permit for it.

Scenes from Central City, Ky., the most populous city in Muhlenberg County.

Its an issue for the party throughout the region. Now, from I-65 westward, there is only one Democrat in the House in Kentucky, Mayor Yonts says, referring to the interstate that divides that commonwealth from Louisville to the north through Bowling Green to the south.

Its happened all across the South. For a century following the Civil War, the South was effectively under one-party, Democratic rule. But southerners started voting for Republicans in response to civil rights legislation, first for president, then U.S. Senate and on down the ballot. Just this month, the number of registered Republicans in Kentucky has exceeded the number of Democrats for the first time. Democrats still enjoy a hefty registration advantage in Muhlenberg County, but clearly many people who havent switched formally are voting for the GOP.

Republicans are convinced this is the year theyll make inroads in county offices, although the party didnt bother fielding a candidate for sheriff. Democrats arent the way they used to be, says a woman in Central City who asked to be identified only as Annie. Democrats, as far as the larger level, theyve gone so far to the left what sex are you, whats taught in schools.

A few days before the primary, Baize moved a portable billboard bearing his own likeness from a gas station along a frontage road to an auto parts store at the center of town. As he hitched the billboard to the back of his white pickup, Baize received plenty of friendly waves and honks. Small-town politics, he says.

Reno says that small-town politics still matter. He comes from a long line of Democratic activists his great-grandfather was Indiana coordinator for Harry Truman, his grandfather held that job for Robert F. Kennedy and his dad was a state party treasurer for decades. Reno is always begging candidates running for federal office to show up in the county, to look people in the eye to take credit for projects or let them know their concerns are being heard.

Breaking with family tradition, Jordan Baize ran as a Republican for county judge-executive.

Theres not as much talk as there used to be about getting parking tickets fixed if you vote the right way, but politics in Muhlenberg County remains informal. Everyone calls local officials by their first names. Reno himself seems to know just about everyone eating in the Mexican restaurant where his daughter works as a waitress, or taking a smoke break outside. Our jailer, his names Terry Nunley, Reno says. Hes related to every Nunley, Shemwell, Penrod and Whitehouse in the county. That right there is about 10,000 people. Im not kidding.

Hernandez-Stevenson runs the Muhlenberg campus of Madisonville Community College and sits on a slew of community boards. She hopes that reinforcing personal connections will help her win back the state House seat Yonts lost six years ago. She does share her fear that some people might not accept me or want to vote for me because she is a Black woman. Muhlenberg County is 93 percent white, but seven of the 20 people on the county Democratic committee are African American.

Democrat Brittney Hernandez-Stevenson is focused on local issues in her run for state representative.

Im here to serve this community, Hernandez-Stevenson says. I want people to realize that Im here to listen to them and figure out what they want done in this district, vs. focusing on some of the national issues that we really have no control over.

Her challenge is that all politics is not local. Politics are highly nationalized, making it difficult for Democrats not just in Muhlenberg County but throughout rural America to persuade voters they wont rubber stamp ideas being pushed by national party leaders from New York and San Francisco.

See original here:
How Rural America Learned to Love the Republican Party - Governing

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the link between politics and health became glaringly obvious. Democrat-leaning blue states were more likely to enact mask requirements and vaccine and social distancing mandates. Republican-leaning red states were much more resistant to health measures. The consequences of those differences emerged by the end of 2020, when rates of hospitalization and death from COVID rose in conservative counties and dropped in liberal ones. That divergence continued through 2021, when vaccines became widely available. And although the highly transmissible Omicron variant narrowed the gap in infection rates, hospitalization and death rates, which are dramatically reduced by vaccines, remain higher in Republican-leaning parts of the country.

But COVID is only the latest chapter in the story of politics and health. COVID has really magnified what had already been brewing in American society, which was that, based on where you lived, your risk of death was much different, says Haider J. Warraich, a physician and researcher at the VA Boston Healthcare System and Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston.

In a study published in June in The BMJ, Warraich and his colleagues showed that over the two decades prior to the pandemic, there was a growing gap in mortality rates for residents of Republican and Democratic counties across the U.S. In 2001, the studys starting point, the risk of death among red and blue counties (as defined by the results of presidential elections) was similar. Overall, the U.S. mortality rate has decreased in the nearly two decades since then (albeit not as much as in most other high-income countries). But the improvement for those living in Republican counties by 2019 was half that of those in Democratic counties11 percent lower versus 22 percent lower.

The studys longitudinal approach and county-by-county analysis replicate and extend a clear pattern, says Jennifer Karas Montez, a sociologist and demographer at Syracuse University, who was not involved in the research. It joins an already existing, pretty robust literature showing that politics [and] polarization do have life-and-death consequences, Montez says.

The new study, conducted by researchers in Texas, Missouri, Massachusetts and Pakistan, covers the years 2001 through 2019 and examines age-adjusted mortality ratesthe number of deaths per 100,000 people each yearfrom the top 10 leading causes of death, as recorded in 2019. These include heart disease, cancer, lung disease, unintentional injuries and suicide. The researchers then analyzed county-level results in each of the five presidential elections that took place during their study period, identifying counties as Republican or Democratic for the subsequent four years. They found the gap in mortality rates between Republican and Democratic counties increased for nine out of 10 causes of death. (The gap for cerebrovascular disease, which includes stroke and aneurysms, remained but narrowed.) Political environment, the authors suggest in the paper, is a core determinant of health.

What is it about conservative areas that might lead to this disadvantage in health outcomes? Multiple factors probably contribute to the gap. Previous research has found differences between Republican and Democratic regions in health-related behaviors such as exercising or smoking. Those findings were nuanced. For example, Democrats had higher odds of smoking, and Republicans were less likely to exercise. But people living in Republican states, whatever their own political leanings, were more likely to smoke.

And an analysis of the new studys data by subgroups supports the idea that individual choices play a role. Hispanic Americans everywhere saw significant improvements in their risk of death. Black Americans still have the highest mortality rates of any racial group, but they saw relatively similar improvement. It didnt really matter where they lived, Warraich says. For white Americans, however, the difference was profounda fourfold increase in the mortality gap between those living in Republican and Democratic areas.

Still, experts say some policy choices may have a larger role than individual behavior in causing poor health. As health outcomes such as life expectancy have diverged in recent years, state policies have been becoming more polarized, says Steven Woolf, a physician and epidemiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. In an editorial that accompanied the BMJ paper, Woolf wrote, Corroborating evidence about the potential health consequences of conservative policies is building.

In a study that focused on life expectancy in the U.S. between 1970 and 2014 and that also looked at some benchmarks beyond those years, Montez, Woolf and others showed that in 1959 a person in Oklahoma could expect to live, on average, about the same number of years as a person in similar circumstances who lived in Connecticut. And both states performed relatively well, compared to the other 48. But by 2017 Connecticuts citizens had a five-year advantage in life expectancy over their peers in Oklahoma, which is a politically conservative state. They were near the top of the chart, whereas Oklahomans were near the bottom.

In the intervening decades liberal states enacted more policies to address health concerns while conservative states went in the opposite direction, with inflection points in the early 1980s 1994 and 2010. Montez notes that those dates line up with Ronald Reagans election as U.S. president, Newt Gingrichs control of Congress and the rise of Tea Party politics. Political affiliation drives social policies and spending, says Lois Lee, a pediatric emergency physician at Boston Childrens Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Conservatives tend to see health as a matter of individual responsibility and to prefer less government intervention. Liberals often promote the role of government to implement regulations to protect health. The Democratic approach has included expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Access to health care and having health insurance are important for well-being, Warraich says. Democrats also spend more on what are known as the social determinants of health. We know things like your housing situation, your socioeconomic status, your access to healthy foods and healthy lifestyles, as well as exposure to toxic stressall these things affect your overall physical as well as emotional and mental health, Lee says.

Several kinds of policiesaround tobacco, labor laws, the environment and gunsrepeatedly emerge as significant. Each party has bundled multiple policies together, Montez says. In Mississippi, for example, there are no statewide clean indoor air policies restricting smoking in bars, restaurants or workplaces, Montez says. In California, on the other hand, smoking is restricted in all three environments. Cigarette taxes also differ dramatically. The places where you cant smoke indoors are also the places where cigarettes cost a lot, Montez says.

As with COVID, the divergence between states over gun safety laws is dramatic. Firearms contribute to deaths from suicide and unintentional injury and to many nonlethal injuries. Blue states are more likely to require background checks, whereas red states more often allow concealed carry of guns. With gun laws, too, researchers are beginning to look at the effects of policies in aggregate, says Garen Wintemute, emergency physician and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. Before California enacted a suite of laws regulating firearms and their ownership and use in the late 1980s and early 1990s, firearm violence mortality rates here were higher than in the rest of the country, he says. After those laws were enacted, rates plummeted in California. The most likely explanation, which Wintemute hopes to test, is that the laws were in part responsible. Until recently, that kind of research has been severely curtailed by the Dickey Amendment, a 1996 addition to a federal spending bill that effectively prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on firearm violence. Congress clarified the law in 2018, paving the way for research funding. Things are modestly looking up, Wintemute says. The CDC and [National Institutes of Health] both have small amounts of research funding and are using it.

Cultural differences between red and blue counties also likely contributed to COVID deaths. Youre affected by your neighbors, says Neil Sehgal, a public health professor at the University of Maryland and co-author of a recent study of the association between COVID mortality and county-level voting. Sehgal and his colleagues found that through October 2021, majority-Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people relative to majority-Democratic counties. To the researchers surprise, however, vaccine uptake explained only 10 percent of the difference. The finding suggests that differences in COVID outcomes are driven by a combination of factors, including the likelihood of, say, engaging in unmasked social events or in-person dining, Sehgal says. By February 2022 the COVID death rate in all counties Donald Trump won in the 2020 presidential election was substantially higher than in counties that Joe Biden won326 deaths per 100,000 people versus 258. COVID was probably the most dramatic example Ive seen in my career of the influence of policy choices on health outcomes, Woolf says.

A key takeaway from these studies is that the partisan mortality gap doesnt have to keep growing. As a public health expert and as a physician, it doesnt matter to me whether my patient is a Republican or Democrat, Warraich says. I want the best outcome for both of those patients and both of those communities. Acknowledging the mortality gap, as challenging as that is in our polarized environment, is the first step toward engaging with solutions, he says. The worst thing that could happen is that [the BMJ study] just becomes labeled as political or partisan, he saysand that the people who really need to look at these findings ignore it because it is providing a truth that is uncomfortable or difficult to interpret.

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People in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties - Scientific American