Retiring Guy's Digest: Greetings from Trump's America UPDATE: Logan County, West Virginia, 96% white, just as Trumpy as it was in 2016 and sick with the delta variant virus

Friday, September 10, 2021

Greetings from Trump's America UPDATE: Logan County, West Virginia, 96% white, just as Trumpy as it was in 2016 and sick with the delta variant virus

Wikipedia

3rd party votes: 11.5% in 1992, 10.6% in 1996, 3.6% in 2016

(Alabama segregationist George Wallace

received 9.2% of the vote in 1968)

Trump received 638 more votes than he did in 2016, a 6% increase, in a county where the 2020 population of 31,429 has decreased 60% since its 1950 peak of 77,391.

Biden received 241 more votes than Clinton did in 2016, an increase of 11%.

Trump's share of the vote increased 1.3 percentage points. Biden increased Clinton's share of the vote 1.1 percentage points.

Additional demographics

% of population 25 and older with bachelor's degree:

10.0% - Logan County
20.6% - West Virginia
32.1% - U.S

% of population 65 and older:

21.1% - Logan County
20.5% - West Virginia
16.5% - U.S.

% of population living in poverty:

21.9% - Logan County
16.0% - West Virginia
10.5% - U.S. (they're joking, of course)

New York Times

Logan County set a new record for highest 7-day average of new Covid cases on September 9, 2021

New York Times

7/19/2019 update, "Logan County, West Virginia, (population 33,700), where 45,586,800 prescription pain pills were supplied from 2006 to 2012" start here.

Next door to ground zero of the
West Virginia's and U.S. opioid crisis

Drilling into the DEA’s pain pill database. (Washington Post, 7/18/2019)

For the first time, a database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States — by manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in every town and city — has been made public.

The Washington Post sifted through nearly 380 million transactions from 2006 through 2012 that are detailed in the DEA’s database and analyzed shipments of oxycodone and hydrocodone pills, which account for three-quarters of the total opioid pill shipments to pharmacies. The Post is making this data available at the county and state levels in order to help the public understand the impact of years of prescription pill shipments on their communities.

Original 3/21/2019 post starts here.

The New Yorker, 11./10/2016

Major Richard Ojeda went to sleep on Tuesday without waiting for the election results, and when he woke up and started reading posts on his phone, at first he didn’t believe them. “It was surreal,” he said. “I was scrolling down to make sure they weren’t fake.” It had been clear for months that West Virginia would go for Trump, and, indeed, in Logan County, where Ojeda lives with his family now that he’s retired from the military, Trump won just less than eighty per cent of the vote. But Ojeda and most people he knew had assumed that Clinton would win the country.

The first thing he felt was relief that Clinton would not be extending Obama’s coal regulations. Four more years of those would have been the end of Logan, he thought. But the election had not been just about Obama, or Clinton, or even Trump, he felt: it was something deeper that people had been responding to. “I think our country has finally started to wake up to the fact that everything’s soft,” he said on Wednesday. “You don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, and everybody seems to be getting a handout without having to work. I don’t want to come off as callous, but I’m telling you it feels that way