ANALYSIS: Red states are vaccinating at a lower rate than blue states

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Sat, 2021-04-10 12:30 — mike kraft

Red states are vaccinating at a lower rate than blue states One of the biggest obstacles in America's race to vaccinate against the coronavirus has been that substantial proportions of certain groups choose not to vaccinate. Analysis by Harry Enten, CNN CNN

(CNN) One of the biggest obstacles in America's race to vaccinate against the coronavirus has been that substantial proportions of certain groups choose not to vaccinate.

The polling has suggested all along that Republicans would be less likely to get vaccinations than Democrats -- and this is now being seen in the real world.

Blue states are starting to outpace red states when it comes to vaccinations, and the instances where that isn't the case are often explained by other expected demographic patterns.

There are a few different ways to look at vaccination rates by state, but they are showing the same picture as of Thursday.

Let's first look at the percentage of those 18 and older with at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.

The top 10 states on this metric are New Hampshire, New Mexico, South Dakota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maine, Vermont, Alaska, and Minnesota and Rhode Island tied. Nearly all of these are states won by President Joe Biden last November, with Alaska and South Dakota as the exceptions.

Now look at the bottom 10 states on this metric: Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Indiana, Wyoming, Missouri, Arkansas and Idaho. Former President Donald Trump won all of these states last year, except for Georgia. ...

An NPR/Marist Poll in the field in late March suggested that we should be seeing a pattern just like this one.

That poll, like others, found that Democrats were far more likely to take the vaccine than Republicans were. Among Democrats, 47% said they had already received one dose of the vaccine. Just 33% of Republicans said they had. When asked whether they would eventually get it, 42% of Democrats said yes, compared with 23% of Republicans.

In other words, the gap that we're already seeing between blue states and red states in terms of vaccination rates is more than likely to widen.

There are a lot of intersecting causes for why different people have been less likely to get vaccinated. ...

Most of the states where vaccination rates are lowest happen to be ones where the Black population is high and where the percentage who graduated from college was low, while the reverse is true in the states with high vaccination rates. Indeed, you can explain nearly 50% of the variation in vaccine rates from state to state just by knowing what percentage of the adult population is Black and what percentage has a college degree. ...

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