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It’s Thursday, April 16. In today’s newsletter: New analysis on how the COVID-19 outbreak is spreading in the largest metropolitan centers versus less densely populated areas. Plus: The internet is still bad.
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« TODAY IN POLITICS »
(The Atlantic)
The Red and Blue America of a Pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic still raging across the U.S. could exacerbate a major Trump-reelection vulnerability: his weakness with urban and suburban voters. Ron Brownstein writes:
The question for Trump this fall will be whether he can offset that weakness by matching or building on his dominant advantage in exurban, small-town, and rural communities. In Wisconsin this week, the GOP lost ground with those voters too, but by and large, polling still shows Trump holding a strong position among them. And because most rural communities are facing fewer cases of the disease so far, they may be much more receptive than big-city leaders and voters to Trump’s calls to reopen the economy as quickly as possible.
These political, public-health, and economic trends all point toward the same possibility: Just as the disease is unfolding very differently in larger and smaller places, the gap between voter preferences there in the presidential race could reach astronomical, and possibly unprecedented, heights.