How much did lockdown and mRNA regret drive voters toward Trump?

The hard-blue states with the toughest lockdowns and vaccine mandates had by far the biggest shifts; a reader email suggests one reason the link may not be coincidental.

This amazing chart ranks states by how heavily their voters shifted toward Trump from 2020 to 2024:

Overall, Trump picked up about 6-7 points in the national popular vote. He trained by 4.5 percentage points in 2020 and will win by 2 or so this time.

But, as this chart shows definitively, blue state voters drove the shift.

Six of the top seven moves to Trump occurred in hard-left states, led by California, the hardest of all. (Florida, the only exception, has gained hundreds of thousands of blue-state refugees since 2020, helping drive its shift.)

And after Mississippi come three more blue states. Except for Mississippi and Florida, the list pretty much captures the states with the hardest Covid lockdown and vaccine mandates and the highest mRNA jab rates.

I was mulling over the correlation this morning when a most interesting reader email popped up in my in-box.

(To find out what it says, subscribe! Paid subscribers deserve a little something extra sometimes too… This one is for you. So subscribe now to read it, or wait a week!)