Probably not, but the esteemed UK-based news magazine (it calls itself a newspaper, but it’s what we yanks think of as a magazine) is now up with a story that puts a national spotlight on a subject I wrote about last month: the fact that Republican counties are dying at a much higher rate than Democratic counties.

In this piece, I focused of course on Georgia and wrote, among other things, that the death rate in the 132 counties that sided with Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election was 38 percent worse than in the 27 counties that went for Kamala Harris, and that the gap had been widening significantly over the years.

In its September 22 article, headlined “In MAGA-land people are dying faster than they are being born,” The Economist looked at more than 3,000 counties instead of 159 and used somewhat different measures. It reached the same two basic conclusions: Red counties are having babies at higher rate, but they are burying people at an even faster pace.

The Economist’s story is behind its paywall and can’t be accessed without a subscription, but I’m going to run the risk that I can crib a bit from it.

On births, the national picture is actually kinder to the GOP than Georgia’s. The Economist estimates that the total fertility rate in counties that usually vote Republican was 1.8 in 2024, against 1.4 in Democratic counties. That’s a gap of nearly 30 percent, well above the roughly 10 percent I found in Georgia and not far from the “35 percent fertility advantage” that Brant Frost V promised Oconee County Republicans back in 2019. Credit where it’s due.

On deaths, it’s a different story. Red counties are older, so you’d expect them to have more deaths. My Georgia numbers didn’t adjust for that. The Economist’s do, and the gap remains: after adjusting for age, the death rate in red counties was 18 percent higher than in blue ones in 2024, up from 16 percent in 2019. Among the most reliably partisan counties, the gap was 27 percent. Life expectancy in the most reliably Democratic counties is 80.7 years. In the most reliably Republican ones, it’s 77.4.

Put those together and you get the headline. For the first time since at least 1982, sayeth the Economist, deaths outnumber births in reliably Republican counties nationwide. In Georgia, 85 of the 98 counties that recorded more deaths than births in 2025 were Trump counties. It turns out Georgia wasn’t an outlier. It was early.

The Economist also found something I didn’t look at: whatever growth red America is getting comes from people moving in, and a lot of those people come from places that don’t vote Republican. In 2022-23, more than 20 percent of newcomers to the fastest-growing red counties came from solidly blue places, according to the Economist, and about 40 percent more came from competitive ones. Before 2016, fast-growing red counties were more Republican than slow-growing ones. Now it’s the reverse. The Economist even suggests that the trend may be helping make Jon Ossoff’s re-election bid here more likely.

Brant Frost V may have been right that his side would have kids at a higher pace, but that was only half the story. Republicans might have an edge in the maternity ward, but they’re taking an even bigger lead in local graveyards.

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