During his Wednesday evening White House press conference Trump said – rambling characteristically – “The blue states had tremendous death rates. If you take the blue states out we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at… by the way we recommend they open up their states”. Making it a competition is sick enough. Completely mischaracterizing it, which he did, is worse.
Analysis of the death toll data by state available on Wikipedia shows that, in total, as of September 14th, 2020, 191,389 Americans died of COVID-19. A little over a third of those occurred in Red States. Since the beginning of Summer 2020 however, that picture changed – a lot.
| State | Total deaths as of 9/14 | Deaths since 6/1 | Deaths since 7/1 |
| Blue States | 103,140 – 53.9% | 36,671 – 39.6% | 20,174 – 29.8% |
| Purple States | 19,442 – 10.2% | 6,558 – 7.1% | 4,408 – 6.5% |
| Red States | 68,807 – 36% | 49,375 – 53.3% | 43,021 – 63.6% |
| Total Deaths | 191,389 [1] | 92,604 [2] | 67,603 [3] |
Now due to the way Trump ducked and dodged responsibility of the pandemic and shifted it to governors in a lot of instances, the definition of what constitutes a Red State and a Blue State is fluid in this context (See my spreadsheet where I tabulated state-by-state here). By my count there are 13 states where the governor is of a different party than the winner of that state in 2016. Six of these – Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Vermont aren’t even close to in doubt in the electoral college in November and thus have been left in their respective 2016 EC colors. Seven more – Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are classified as Purple States for the purposes of this exercise in “blame”.
The second season of this pandemic has been an absolute shitshow for Red States. They should’ve fucking learned from what went wrong in New York and New Jersey in the Spring, but they refused and people died. Splitting it up by Democrat vs Republican is shitty enough, but to lie about who’s been doing better is just more of the sick shit we’ve come to expect from Trump. I don’t like MAGA hatters, but I’d throw a rope to one if he was drowning. We’re still Americans and fellow human beings at the end of the day.
Enough of this. Vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.