Are NC Trump voters actually less likely to get COVID shots? What county data show.
Residents living in North Carolina’s most vaccine-hesitant counties are more likely to have supported Donald Trump during the 2020 election, according to a review of recent state COVID-19 and election data by the Charlotte Observer.
Of the 11 counties where at least half of the population has had a single dose of a coronavirus vaccine, just three went majority-Trump last year. Those are Dare, Hyde and Brunswick counties.
In the 10 counties with the lowest vaccination rates, just two — Hoke and Cumberland counties — preferred Joe Biden.
Though the counties on the extremes consistently preferred one candidate over the other, the average vaccination rate in counties where Trump lost was just 4 percentage points higher than in those where he won.
Trump won 75 of North Carolina’s 100 counties during the last presidential election. Together, the average vaccination rate in those counties is 40%. In the 25 counties that he lost, the average vaccination rate is 44.6%.
In other states, correlation between vaccination rates and partisan politics is even stronger, with polling and health data showing Republican voters are far less likely to want a shot.
Household income also affects vaccination rates. A Raleigh News & Observer analysis just last month looked at census tract data and found “those mostly vaccinated tracts are disproportionately clustered in areas with the highest median household incomes — places like Myers Park in Charlotte or Five Points in Raleigh with vaccination rates of 75% or higher.”
Trump, who got vaccinated in January, has called the shot a “miracle” and encouraged people to get vaccinated even after he left office.
“I would recommend it and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly,” Trump said during a FOX News interview in March.
The GOP and the vaccine
The correlation between the last presidential election and vaccination rates is present in North Carolina, but it is less stark than the national trend. Of the 10 states with the lowest vaccination rates, Trump lost just one — Georgia. Biden won every state with the 10 highest vaccination rates.
Still, some Republican officials have championed the vaccine and pleaded with residents to get the shot.
“I’m perplexed in the difficulty we have finishing the job,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader from Kentucky, said this week. “If you’re a football fan, we’re in the red zone, but we’re not in the end zone yet and we need to keep preaching that getting the vaccine is important.”
In North Carolina, as of Wednesday, 48% of residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the state dashboard. Nationally, 55.6% of people have taken at least one shot. (The state Department of Health and Human Services data does not include some vaccinations. For example, because of the reporting system of military bases, Cumberland and Onslow counties have higher vaccination rates according to the CDC than they do on the state dashboard.)
Several Republican lawmakers have pushed residents to get vaccinated in North Carolina. Both House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Temp Phil Berger have appeared in ads pushing the vaccine.
“I took my shot because I wanted to make sure that I had done everything to protect myself, but also to protect the people that I came in contact with,” Berger said in an advertisement.
U.S. Rep. Greg Murphy said in a statement to the Observer on Wednesday that “it is up to us to get the vaccine and forge a pathway to recovery from the pandemic.”
“However, I understand that some North Carolinians are hesitant to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. This is understandable,” said Murphy, who is also a doctor.
“There is a lot of information out there about the effects of the vaccine, but in my medical opinion, any risks associated with the COVID-19 vaccine are far, far outweighed by the benefits of ensuring that our communities can stay healthy.”
Other Republicans, while not directly disputing the effectiveness of the vaccine, have put out statements that could stoke doubt. U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, tweeted last week that the government “doesn’t decide who gets vaccinated. You do.”
“Do not submit to the fearmongers,” he added, responding to a proposal from the Biden administration to encourage door-to-door vaccination outreach.
Paul has said that he is not anti-vaccination.
Responding to the same Biden proposal, North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn said on a radio show last week the strategy could be used to “go door to door to take your guns. They could then go door to door to take your Bibles.”
Do politicians change people’s minds?
Politics and vaccine hesitancy are correlated, but how much sway politicians actually have on vaccine-hesitant people is unclear. A poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, released on Wednesday, most people had their minds made up about whether to get the vaccine as early as January.
Of people who said in January that they were skeptical of the vaccine — including people who had said they would “wait and see,” or “only get vaccinated if required” or “definitely not” get vaccinated — about 20% are now inoculated against the virus.
The vast majority — 92% — of people who said in January that they would get it “as soon as possible” how now received at least one shot, Kaiser found.
Among vaccine-hesitant or resistant people who changed their minds and got vaccinated, 52% said they learned or heard something that persuaded them. More than a third said they talked to someone who helped convince them. One fifth of unvaccinated adults said they haven’t been vaccinated because they’re concerned about side effects.
Ashley Kirzinger, the associate director of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said politics were rarely mentioned as the primary driver of why a person was not getting vaccinated. Some, especially among the most resistant group who said they would “definitely not” get vaccinated, did espouse a distrust of government as the reason.
Only a handful of people who were initially against getting a shot but by June had been vaccinated credited politicians or famous people for persuading them.
One person in the Kaiser poll — a 68-year-old white Republican from New York — put it bluntly: “Trump got vaccinated.”
Ed Driggs, a Republican on the Charlotte City Council, said that some Republicans were conflating the idea of opposing a government-mandated vaccine with not getting the shot at all — that people had refused the shot out of some sense of personal liberty.
There is currently no federal requirement that people be vaccinated against COVID-19 although many businesses are providing incentives to employees to get the shot and some industries may begin mandating vaccines for certain workers following further FDA review (similar to seasonal flu shots).
“Opposing the idea that the government can force you to get a shot is not the same thing as not getting the shot,” he said.
“People are not crystal clear in their own minds about that distinction. They are so caught up in opposing the government making them do something that they’ve cut off their own nose to spite their face.”
This story was originally published July 15, 2021 at 10:47 AM with the headline "Are NC Trump voters actually less likely to get COVID shots? What county data show.."
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