More than half of Americans live in counties where the vote margin between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was 20 percentage points or more. Still, the percentage of Americans living in landslide counties dropped a bit from 2016 to 2020. Republicans and Democrats were less divided in the 2020 election […]
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Using the White House Coronavirus Task Force definition, the Daily Yonder found that 32 percent of rural counties and 41 percent of metropolitan counties should be enacting more stringent measures to control the spread of COVID-19. A third of all rural counties are in a “red zone” for COVID-19 cases, […]
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Pain from working in the mines, not layoffs, led to opioid addiction, researchers say. The assumption has long been that people turn to drugs when they lose their jobs. In coal mining areas in Appalachia, where the opioid epidemic began, the storyline has been that as mining jobs disappear, opioid […]
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Andy Beshear’s lead in the Kentucky gubernatorial race came largely from cities and suburbs. But a shift toward the Democratic candidate occurred across the state, compared to the 2015 governor’s election. This time, it really was the cities and suburbs. The television maps of Kentucky’s vote Tuesday night appeared to […]
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While Democrat candidates criticize Trump on the economy, the states that hold their presidential nomination contests first (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina) are doing better than the rest of nation with jobs. Job growth in the first four Democratic primary states was far stronger than the national average […]
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Children from poor families growing up in rural areas were less likely to be in prison by their late 20s and early 30s, according to a massive study conducted by economists at Harvard University. Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and a team of statisticians conducted this complicated study. Using Census information […]
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