“E pluribus unum” — out of many, one — is one of America’s traditional mottos. As The Times’s Tom Edsall put it in a recent article, “red and blue voters live in different economies.”What Edsall didn’t point out is that red and blue voters don’t just live differently, they also die differently. About the living part: Democratic-leaning areas used to look similar to Republican-leaning areas in terms of productivity, income and education. But they have been rapidly diverging, with blue areas getting more productive, richer and better educated. In the close election of 2016, counties that supported Hillary Clinton accounted for 64 percent of output, almost twice the share of Trump country.

Source: New York Times December 02, 2019 22:52 UTC