Posts tagged ‘Georgia’

Nov 17

More TIGC lessons from the 2022 governor’s race

Further notes from a deep (and continuing) dive into the results of Georgia’s 2020 General Election:

Georgia is as divided politically as it is economically, educationally, and health-wise — and those divisions have all taken shape over roughly the same time period. I’ll start here with a little history lesson. In 1990, Lt. Governor Zell Miller, a Democrat, made his first run for governor and defeated his Republican opponent, State Senator Johnny Isakson, by 8.3 percentage points. In our just completed 2022 gubernatorial contest, incumbent Republican Brian Kemp defeated his Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams by a comparable 7.6 points.

But the way Miller and Kemp assembled their winning majorities could not have been more different — and this is important to understanding our current political environment and the challenges the state faces in reconciling the differences between Atlanta and Notlanta.

In 1990, 45 counties were decided by less than 10 percentage points. This year, only 10 counties were decided by that margin. In 1990, Miller cracked 70 percent of the vote in a grand total of seven counties. This year, Kemp hit that threshold in 90 counties, including four where he rolled up 90 percent of the vote and 31 where he broke 80 percent. One of those 80 percent counties was Miller’s native Towns County; in 1990, Towns County voters gave their native son 73.5 percent of their vote; this year, they gave Kemp 84.5 percent.

These maps offer political portraits of Georgia in 1990 and 2022. Over the course of three decades, nearly every rural county in the state switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP — but that’s not the most important takeaway from these maps.

The most important takeaway is the extent of that switch. The darker the red or blue, the higher the percentage of the vote each party received. While Democrats dominated the state in 1990, its winning map was made up largely of pastel blues while the 2022 map features darker shades of blood red throughout most of the state.

In the last century, the vast majority of the state was politically competitive. Few if any counties tilted so heavily in one direction that it made no sense for candidates from the other party to campaign in them. Generally, there were enough votes in play almost everywhere to justify at least a quick campaign stop and press interview by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Indeed, in 1980, Norman Underwood, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat then held by Herman Talmadge, made campaigning in every single county in the state a significant element of his platform. The only part of the pledge that seemed dubious was whether he had the logistical wherewithal and the time — in a relatively short campaign — to meander all over the state (my recollection is that he made it). This year, when Democrat Abrams started her campaign in rural Randolph County and vowed to campaign in “every region” of the state, some observers (yours truly included) wondered if that was a good use of her time and money.

I don’t know where the tipping point is, but it seems to me that communities that tilt 75 or 80 percent in either direction might be fairly regarded as hostile territory by the other party, and not worth significant campaign time or resources.

Moreover, the same forces that shape the political and electoral environment animate the policy-making thinking of legislators elected by those respective communities. I submit that’s true whether you’re considering the challenges facing rural Georgia or the hot-button cultural issues that have a way of working their way into the General Assembly.

(Case in point, stay tuned for more on Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney’s ruling that Governor Kemp’s vaunted anti-abortion “heartbeat bill” is unconstitutional under Georgia law. That drops the hottest of hot potatoes onto the Gold Dome and confronts the Republican majority in the General Assembly with a choice between trying to pass a new bill or waiting to see if the appellate courts reverse McBurney’s decision.)

Another key takeaway from last week’s election results is that Abrams lost significant ground in just about every major urban county in the state. In last week’s first hot take on the election, TIGC focused on the results in Georgia’s rural counties, where Abrams lost ground against her 2018 performance. Your humble TIGC scribe was focused on the rural trees, and in the process I overlooked the larger statewide forest: the picture was pretty much the same everywhere, and for Team Abrams that picture was not pretty.

In traditionally reliable urban climes, Abrams’s losses appear to be due first and foremost to plunging turnout numbers — drops which were largely matched by drops in her own vote totals. This was true in Metro Atlanta and in other Democratic strongholds across the state. Particularly disappointing to Abrams had to be the results of vote-rich DeKalb and Gwinnett. Compared to the 2018 governor’s race, those two counties saw their total turnout plunge by more than 15,000 votes each, and Abrams’s vote totals suffered similar drops (see table below).

The picture was much the same in deep blue fortresses along the gnat line — Muscogee, Bibb and Richmond — as well as Chatham County and elsewhere. In those four counties alone, Abrams saw her vote total versus 2018 drop nearly 17,000 votes, while Kemp fattened his total (in, again, Democratic territory) by more than 3,300 votes. In TIGC’s 12-county Metro Atlanta region, Abrams’s margin over Kemp fell from 62.2%-to-37.8% in 2018 to 59.5%-to-40.5% in this year’s election. In the process, Kemp boosted his Metro Atlanta totals by nearly 46,000 over his 2018 numbers while Abrams saw hers fall by more than 60,000.

Meanwhile, Kemp was also mopping up in Atlanta’s northern ‘burbs. Following the 2020 presidential election, I wrote that the GOP was working to build a political Maginot Line across North Georgia and that the North Georgia hills were the future home base for the state’s Republican Party. The leading edge of that line is the fast-growing suburban and exurban precincts across north Atlanta.

In recent election cycles, Democrats had made gains in those areas, winning Cobb and Gwinnett counties and cutting into GOP margins in Cherokee, Forsyth and other counties. This time around, Kemp & Company held the line and regained fair chunks of lost ground (as the table below shows). Indeed, in contrast to the situation in virtually every Democratic stronghold, voters turned out in bigger numbers in Cherokee, Forsyth and other hill country counties. There was a smidgen of good news for Abrams in these numbers: she grew her vote totals in Cherokee and Forsyth, but only by a fraction of Kemp’s gains.

And, yes, it looks like ticket-splitting really happened this time around. Incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock — being challenged by Trump-backed former UGA football star Herschel Walker — outpolled Abrams in all 159 counties and rolled up nearly 132,000 more votes than she got. That gave him a lead going into the December 6th runoff against Walker.

Stay tuned for more on what all this is likely to mean.

(c) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2022

Nov 29

3 Comments

Rural Georgia leads race to the bottom in per capita income. The question is, why?

The week before Thanksgiving, I served as the lead-off speaker for a day-long symposium, sponsored by Georgia State University’s Urban Studies Institute, on Georgia’s urban-rural divide. About an hour before I started my presentation, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) put out its annual report on county-level per capita income. It’s a shame I couldn’t have gotten an advance look at the data; it would have provided a great addition to my presentation.

I’ve now spent two or three days rolling around in the data and can already see that I’ll be able to milk several solid posts out of the BEA spreadsheet. For starters, though, I’ll focus on Georgia’s at least mildly surprising showing at the bottom of the nation’s per capita income pile.

One useful thing about the BEA report is that it includes data on more than 3,100 counties and comparable governmental jurisdictions. That makes it possible to compare Georgia to its neighbors and, indeed, the entire country. It also makes it possible to document the extent of the divide between Georgia’s haves and have-nots.

The first unhappy headline out of this data dive is that Georgia counties occupy the bottom two places on the national list. Wheeler County finished 3,114th out of 3,114 counties with a 2020 PCI of $21,087, just behind Telfair County at 3,113th with a PCI of $22,644. As a frame of reference, those figures are less than one-fourth of Fulton County’s state-leading per capita income of $95,683 and about one-tenth the PCI of $220,645 in Teton County, Wyoming, which ranks No. 1 nationally.

Perhaps even more troubling, Georgia is home to 10 of the bottom 30 counties nationally. The only other states with more than two counties in the bottom 30 are Florida with six and South Dakota with four. Because Georgia has so many more counties than most states, it might be possible to argue that the number of counties on any such list isn’t all that important. So, let’s look at population.

Of the 10 states with counties in the Bottom 30, Georgia had a larger share of its population living in those counties than any other state except South Dakota, whose four counties in the Bottom 30 were made up largely or entirely of impoverished Indian reservations. As the table at right shows, some 1.2 percent of Georgia’s overall population resides in a Bottom 30 county; except for South Dakota, all the other states’ Bottom 30 populations were below one-half of one percent.

Still untroubled? Okay, let’s broaden the focus.

As I’ve already suggested, the BEA data allows you to sort and rank all 3,114 counties (and comparable jurisdictions) nationally. Having done that, I’ve also sliced the nation, and the state, into quartiles. Of Georgia’s 159 counties, 104 counties posted 2020 PCIs in the bottom national quartile.

Those 104 counties are home to 28.5 percent of Georgia’s 10.7 million residents — a higher percentage of people living in the bottom quartile than any of its adjoining states except Alabama, where the number is 29.6 percent. This table shows the total populations and quartile splits for Georgia and all its contiguous neighbors.

I’ll have more to say about this in a subsequent post, but one initial takeaway (in my view) is that it’s pretty good illustration of the extent of the chasm between Georgia’s haves and have-nots.

To widen the lens even further, Georgia has more people living in the bottom quartile than any other state in the nation, including Texas, Florida and all the other states with larger populations. Some 3.05 million Georgians live in the bottom PCI quartile.

Texas, with nearly three times Georgia’s population, has only 2.75 million residents living in the bottom quartile. In Florida, which has double Georgia’s population, the number of residents in the bottom quartile is 2.01 million. North Carolina, with essentially the same population as Georgia, has nearly 1.3 million fewer people in its bottom tier counties.

Of the 779 counties in TIGC’s bottom quartile, 104 are in Georgia; only four other states — Arkansas (54 counties), Kentucky (65), Mississippi (55) and Missouri (54) — had more than 50 counties in the bottom quartile.

That rural Georgia’s 2020 per capita income is so low is not in and of itself all that surprising. But that the state performs so much worse than neighboring states like Florida and North Carolina is frankly more than a little disconcerting and a bit of a mystery. How those states have been able to do a better job of moving their populations out of the bottom PCI tier and up the economic ladder is a question that needs to be answered.

Watch this space.

The interactive map below highlights Georgia’s 159 counties based on their National PCI Quartile. The lighter the shade, the higher the quartile.

The interactive table below shows 2020 per capita income data for all 159 Georgia counties, along with their state and national rank and the national quartile into which each county falls.

Mar 13

2 Comments

New medical study confirms what TIGC has been saying for a year now. You’re welcome.

The American Journal of Preventive Medicine (AJPM) earlier this week published a new statistical study which basically found that American states led by Democratic governors have fared better through the worst of the pandemic than those governed by Republicans.

Opined the authors: “Gubernatorial party affiliation may drive policy decisions that impact COVID-19 infections and deaths across the U.S. Future policy decisions should be guided by public health considerations rather than political ideology.”

Gee, you think?

Actually, I’m glad to see this kind of big academic study. As eye-glazing as it can be in places, it reinforces a lot of the observations I’ve made here at Trouble in God’s Country since Covid-19 rolled in a year ago. Early on, I started noticing differences between between Georgia, where Republican Governor Brian Kemp was famously loathe to impose restrictions because of the pandemic, and North Carolina, where Democratic Governor Roy Cooper acted pretty quickly and decisively to begin closing down his state.

The two states have a lot in common, including demographics, economics, educational levels, and population size. Pretty much from the get-go, North Carolina was performing more Covid-19 tests and reporting more confirmed cases but fewer deaths.

Based on the latest data available from the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker, North Carolina has since significantly out-performed Georgia. As of Thursday, March 11, Georgia, with a population of 10.6 million, had more than a million confirmed and probable cases and 18,117 Covid-19 deaths; North Carolina, whose population is only slightly smaller at 10.4 million, has recorded 879,825 such cases and 11,622 deaths.

A week or so after that first Georgia-North Carolina comparison last March, I posted a new piece that broadened the focus and compared a half-dozen Old South states led by proudly conservative Republicans (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee) to three deep blue West Coast states led by liberal Democratic governors (California, Oregon and Washington).

The two regions had very comparable populations — 51.4 million for the three West Coast states versus 51.9 million for the six Old South states. But the regions’ governors were taking very different approaches in fighting the virus. The governors on the West Coast, which bore the brunt of the virus’s initial attack, took early, dramatic actions to shut down their states and limit the virus’s spread, while the Old South’s GOP governors were openly resisting most public health-driven actions.

At the time of that initial report — not even a month into the pandemic — the West Coast had suffered 543 deaths versus 500 for the Old South, but the Old South was already piling up more cases: more than 24,000 versus just over 18,500 for the West Coast.

I pulled fresh numbers from the CDC’s Covid-19 Data Tracking website on Friday, and the Old South’s performance now looks much worse in comparison to the West Coast (where, again, the virus initially turned Seattle into the public health equivalent of Chernobyl and has continued to savage the California coast) than it did last April. The Old South states have racked up 25,000 more deaths than the West Coast and a million more confirmed and probable cases, as this table details:

The AJPM study found that the Republican-led states had lower case and death rates for the first several months of the pandemic, but that those trend lines crossed — on June 3, 2020, for case rates and a month later, on July 4, for death rates.

That’s generally in line with another TIGC observation. I tracked county-level case and death rates on an almost daily basis for the first several months of the pandemic by the political party each county sided with in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election. Early on, the virus did most of its damage in urban areas that were heavily populated and largely Democratic, such as Metro Atlanta; the virus was indeed slow to show up in sparsely-populated rural areas of Georgia that largely sided with Governor Kemp and other Republicans.

But it did get there — and, just as the authors of the AJPM study found, the trend lines eventually crossed. By my calculations, the death rate in counties that went for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams had been higher — that is, worse — from the opening days of the pandemic through most of August; they crossed on August 25, 2020. The case rate trend lines were a little slower to intersect, but finally crossed on September 9.

I took another look at this phenomenon following last year’s presidential election and found the same pattern, as this table to the right shows. By election day, President Donald J. Trump’s Georgia counties had significantly worse case rates, death rates and 14-day case rates than his then-Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.

The authors of the AJPM study were careful to avoid asserting causality in the statistical relationship between the governors’ party affiliation and their states’ Covid-19 results. And, indeed, there are a variety of factors other than politics that probably contribute to different outcomes. In an early piece speculating that rural Georgia might eventually be harder hit than the state’s urban areas, I cited the facts that rural Georgians were generally in poorer health than their city cousins and had access to much frailer health care delivery systems. At that point, the political differences were just beginning to come into focus.

But, statistical limitations aside, it now seems silly to ignore the obvious political relationships and implications. It’s often said that the 50 states function as laboratories for American democracy. For a year now, that’s clearly been the case where America’s response to Covid-19 is concerned. But it’s a shame we all wound up being used as human guinea pigs.

Long-time friend and long-ago colleague Terry L. Wells contributed to this article. He first spotted and posted to Facebook an article about the AJPM study, without which I probably would have missed the whole thing.

Sep 9

6 Comments

Covid-19 death rate in Kemp counties now tops that in Abrams counties; case rate trend lines also converging

Here’s a little breaking news on the coronavirus front: The Covid-19 death rate is now higher, collectively, in the Georgia counties that voted for Governor Brian Kemp in 2018 than in those that went for his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams. What’s more, the difference in the rate of confirmed cases is narrowing dramatically.

This is a little bit of a surprise. Early on, the virus hit densely-populated urban Democratic precincts much harder than remote, sparsely-populated Republican communities, and there was a good bit of credible speculation that the gap between the two might never fully close.

The New York Times took a deep dive into national data in late May and posited that while case and death rates were rising in conservative areas, it wasn’t “on a scale that would close the gap in the virus’s impact on red and blue counties.”

That’s no longer true in Georgia. The Covid-19 death rate in the 130 mostly rural counties carried by Kemp in 2018 squeaked past that of the 29 largely urban counties that went for Abrams on August 25th.

The Kemp and Abrams death rate trend lines converged through the middle part of August. They were nearly identical by August 24th — 47.52 deaths per 100,000 people in the Abrams counties versus 47.43 in the Kemp counties. The next day, the lines crossed — 48.37 deaths per 100,000 people in the Abrams counties versus 48.52 in the Kemp counties — and they’ve been separating, fairly rapidly, ever since, as the graph above shows.

The Abrams counties have so far suffered more overall deaths than the Kemp counties: 3,095 out of population of 5.67 million versus 2,833 out of a population of 4.95 million. But even that may be changing. Since the Kemp and Abrams death rate trendlines crossed on August 25th, there have been 785 Covid-19 deaths in Georgia. Of those, 353 occurred in the Abrams counties while 432 took place in Kemp country.

While the Abrams counties are still reporting higher rates of confirmed Covid-19 cases than the Kemp counties, those trend lines are also converging. On August 25th — the day the death rate trend lines crossed — the 29 Abrams counties had a combined confirmed case rate of 2316.7 cases per 100,000 while the combined case rate for the 130 Kemp counties was 2178.6, a difference of 6.3 percent. By September 8th, the difference was down to 1.9 percent — 2529.9 cases per 100,000 people for the Abrams counties versus 2483.2 for the Kemp counties.

Put another way, during that August 25-September 8 period, the Abrams counties reported a total of 12,089 new confirmed Covid-19 cases while the Kemp counties reported 15,069 new cases.

These trends can, of course, shift. The recent death and case rate trends appear to have been driven largely by the virus’s Sherman-like march across east-central and southeast Georgia, which is heavily rural and went overwhelmingly for Kemp. All it would take to alter — indeed, reverse — these patterns would be a major outbreak in one or more of the major urban counties.

Still, the current data and trends would appear to put to rest the early thinking that the virus would be satisfied with feasting on Democrats in densely-populated urban areas. It took it a while, but it finally found its way to virtually every corner of the state’s rural areas, which have older, less healthy populations and frailer healthcare delivery systems. Those Republican hunting grounds now appear to be just as fruitful for Covid-19 as the big Democratic cities.

May 27

Even a nonpartisan plague gets politicized in 21st century America

It was, of course, inevitable that the Covid-19 pandemic would quickly be viewed through a political lens. I’m as guilty as anybody. Pretty early on, I was complaining on Facebook about President Trump’s bungling of the nation’s response to the plague, and here on Trouble in God’s Country I took note of the different strategies pursued by Republican governors here in the bright red old south versus their liberal Democratic counterparts the far west.

On Monday, The New York Times published a report that took the first big look (at least that I’ve seen) at whether the ugly little virus was wreaking more havoc on Democrats or Republicans. Under the headline “The Coronavirus is Deadliest Where Democrats Live,” the Times reported:

“Democrats are far more likely to live in counties where the virus has ravaged the community, while Republicans are more likely to live in counties that have been relatively unscathed by the illness, though they are paying an economic price. Counties won by President Trump in 2016 have reported just 27 percent of the virus infections and 21 percent of the deaths — even though 45 percent of Americans live in these communities, a New York Times analysis has found.”

I’d been thinking about doing the same sort of piece about Georgia, but was concerned that any such analysis would be flawed by a variety of factors, including limited data and questions about the extent of testing in certain parts of the state, especially rural areas. I still have those concerns, but if the great gray lady can hold forth on this topic, so can Trouble in God’s Country.

The Times sorted national Covid-19 data by counties that voted for Trump in 2016 versus those that went for Democrat Hillary Clinton. I used county-level data from Georgia’s 2018 governor’s race and mashed it up with Covid-19 cases and deaths reported by the Georgia Department of Public Health as of early Tuesday morning, May 26.

Georgia’s Democratic counties — the 29 that voted for Stacey Abrams in 2018 — have so far borne the brunt of the virus’s attack, but the picture here isn’t as lopsided as the national breakdown reported by the Times.

The Abrams/Democratic counties are home to 53.2 percent of the state’s population and have so far suffered 55.8 percent of the infections and 57.4 percent of the Covid-19 deaths. The Abrams counties were for the most part heavily and densely populated urban counties, including the largest counties in Metro Atlanta, along with major out-state counties and a handful of smaller rural counties.

The 129 counties carried by the ultimate winner in that 2018 race, Republican Brian Kemp, claim 46.8 percent of the state’s population and so far have posted 44.2 percent of the Covid-19 cases and 42.6 percent of the deaths. Governor Kemp’s counties were largely rural counties (as the map here shows).

The Times also reports that: “In the country as a whole, outbreaks in conservative rural counties are rising, but not on a scale that would close the gap in the virus’s impact on red and blue counties.”

I’m skeptical that holds here in Georgia. While Abrams’s Democratic counties have logged more cases and deaths than Kemp’s Republican counties, their overall case rates and Covid-19 death rates aren’t that different. In Abrams’s counties, 387.8 people per 100,000 have contracted the virus and 18.3 per 100,000 have died; in Kemp’s counties, 346.3 people per 100,000 have tested positive while 15.5 per 100,000 have died.

In addition to having relatively comparable case and death rates, my analysis of an admittedly limited body of DPH data suggests that case rates in rural Georgia are ticking up at least a little faster than in urban areas. From May 16 through May 26, case rates in the Kemp counties rose 17.6 percent versus 14.5 percent in the Abrams counties.

Two other factors contribute to my suspicion that the gap between the Kemp and Abrams counties might continue to close. One is that it’s still not clear that sufficient testing is being done in rural counties. The other is that there’s a growing body of polling and other data to suggest that Republicans, perhaps especially those in rural areas, are taking the virus less seriously than their Democratic counterparts and not doing as good a job of following masking and social-distancing recommendations (here’s one good story on this phenomenon).

Bottom line, while more densely-populated Democratic counties may have represented low-hanging fruit for Covid-19, it’s far from clear that it hasn’t been able to find its way to Georgia’s sparsely-populated rural counties. If testing becomes more pervasive in rural Georgia and its residents are indeed taking a casual attitude toward the virus, the gap between the Democratic and Republican counties will almost certainly close up.

My hunch is that we’ll eventually realize that the virus itself is the only truly nonpartisan actor in this ongoing tragedy.

___________

Following are lists of the counties carried by Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, along with data on the number of positive Covid-19 cases and deaths as of the morning of May 26, 2020. To conduct this analysis and show the totals and case rates by the two groups of counties, I had to recalculate the county-specific case rates and then calculate the totals and rates for each group. For some reason, the case rate results I got were a little different from those published by DPH. As the denominator, I used the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 population estimates. The equation for calculating the case rates is straightforward: (Positive Cases/2019 Population Estimates) X 100,000. In the interest of transparency, I’m showing both the DPH Case Rates (as published on its website) and the TIGC Case Rate Calculation.

Kemp Counties:

County	Positive Cases	Deaths	DPH Case Rate	2019 Population Estimates	TIGC Case Rate Calculation
Appling	134	13	721.9	18,386	728.8
Atkinson	31	2	372.2	8,165	379.7
Bacon	77	2	675.2	11,164	689.7
Baker	33	2	1059.1	3,038	1086.2
Banks	73	0	365.3	19,234	379.5
Barrow	292	11	338.0	83,240	350.8
Bartow	443	36	399.9	107,738	411.2
Ben Hill	61	1	366.5	16,700	365.3
Berrien	37	0	192.0	19,397	190.8
Bleckley	38	0	296.0	12,873	295.2
Brantley	51	2	265.6	19,109	266.9
Brooks	67	9	426.0	15,457	433.5
Bryan	70	5	178.9	39,627	176.6
Bulloch	52	2	65.4	79,608	65.3
Burke	123	4	550.5	22,383	549.5
Butts	211	21	838.2	24,936	846.2
Camden	55	1	102.0	54,666	100.6
Candler	13	0	120.0	10,803	120.3
Carroll	472	24	392.9	119,992	393.4
Catoosa	105	0	152.7	67,580	155.4
Charlton	29	1	218.9	13,392	216.5
Chattahoochee	25	0	232.6	10,907	229.2
Chattooga	24	2	96.9	24,789	96.8
Cherokee	831	29	311.7	258,773	321.1
Clinch	56	1	841.4	6,618	846.2
Coffee	250	13	580.8	43,273	577.7
Colquitt	349	14	768.8	45,600	765.4
Columbia	224	6	141.2	156,714	142.9
Cook	46	2	263.8	17,270	266.4
Coweta	376	8	247.4	148,509	253.2
Crawford	26	0	212.6	12,404	209.6
Crisp	223	7	1000.5	22,372	996.8
Dade	27	1	167.1	16,116	167.5
Dawson	103	1	381.2	26,108	394.5
Decatur	153	4	581.3	26,404	579.5
Dodge	48	2	235.5	20,605	233.0
Dooly	172	12	1283.6	13,390	1284.5
Early	235	29	2316.2	10,190	2306.2
Echols	62	0	1562.1	4,006	1547.7
Effingham	63	1	98.4	64,296	98.0
Elbert	71	0	374.8	19,194	369.9
Emanuel	27	2	119.1	22,646	119.2
Evans	5	0	46.8	10,654	46.9
Fannin	40	1	152.0	26,188	152.7
Fayette	221	13	188.0	114,421	193.1
Floyd	228	14	228.2	98,498	231.5
Forsyth	480	12	190.1	244,252	196.5
Franklin	39	1	167.2	23,349	167.0
Gilmer	137	0	436.1	31,369	436.7
Glascock	1	0	33.1	2,971	33.7
Glynn	87	1	101.1	85,292	102.0
Gordon	138	15	237.7	57,963	238.1
Grady	93	4	379.0	24,633	377.5
Greene	64	7	341.9	18,324	349.3
Habersham	502	19	1096.1	45,328	1107.5
Hall	2327	41	1127.7	204,441	1138.2
Haralson	36	2	117.2	29,792	120.8
Harris	83	4	239.1	35,236	235.6
Hart	26	0	99.6	26,205	99.2
Heard	28	2	226.4	11,923	234.8
Houston	349	16	222.2	157,863	221.1
Irwin	24	1	254.4	9,416	254.9
Jackson	148	4	198.1	72,977	202.8
Jasper	31	1	218.3	14,219	218.0
Jeff Davis	34	1	224.5	15,115	224.9
Jenkins	18	1	209.9	8,676	207.5
Johnson	81	2	838.4	9,643	840.0
Jones	34	0	118.9	28,735	118.3
Lamar	53	1	273.9	19,077	277.8
Lanier	14	2	135.3	10,423	134.3
Laurens	104	1	219.9	47,546	218.7
Lee	354	22	1181.1	29,992	1180.3
Lincoln	15	0	184.6	7,921	189.4
Long	12	1	60.3	19,559	61.4
Lowndes	250	4	212.1	117,406	212.9
Lumpkin	91	1	269.2	33,610	270.8
Madison	39	1	129.2	29,880	130.5
Marion	49	2	590.9	8,359	586.2
McDuffie	63	5	291.7	21,312	295.6
McIntosh	12	0	82.4	14,378	83.5
Meriwether	78	2	371.1	21,167	368.5
Miller	38	0	659.3	5,718	664.6
Mitchell	399	32	1809.0	21,863	1825.0
Monroe	118	8	425.6	27,578	427.9
Montgomery	10	0	108.4	9,172	109.0
Morgan	37	0	193.3	19,276	191.9
Murray	78	1	193.7	40,096	194.5
Oconee	105	5	251.6	40,280	260.7
Oglethorpe	58	5	380.6	15,259	380.1
Paulding	291	11	168.7	168,667	172.5
Peach	70	3	255.7	27,546	254.1
Pickens	43	3	128.2	32,591	131.9
Pierce	90	3	460.5	19,465	462.4
Pike	50	2	265.1	18,962	263.7
Polk	97	0	223.1	42,613	227.6
Pulaski	39	2	358.0	11,137	350.2
Putnam	88	8	402.1	22,119	397.8
Quitman	11	1	479.5	2,299	478.5
Rabun	15	1	88.3	17,137	87.5
Schley	16	1	303.3	5,257	304.4
Screven	28	2	201.4	13,966	200.5
Seminole	43	2	528.3	8,090	531.5
Spalding	259	17	374.8	66,703	388.3
Stephens	123	2	467.2	25,925	474.4
Tattnall	15	0	59.0	25,286	59.3
Taylor	21	2	263.9	8,020	261.8
Telfair	33	1	210.9	15,860	208.1
Thomas	313	31	704.5	44,451	704.1
Tift	228	15	558.4	40,644	561.0
Toombs	50	4	185.3	26,830	186.4
Towns	22	1	182.8	12,037	182.8
Treutlen	8	0	117.2	6,901	115.9
Troup	260	9	369.2	69,922	371.8
Turner	105	12	1300.2	7,985	1315.0
Twiggs	14	0	173.1	8,120	172.4
Union	39	1	153.9	24,511	159.1
Upson	275	33	1046.5	26,320	1044.8
Walker	96	0	137.9	69,761	137.6
Walton	196	10	204.6	94,593	207.2
Ware	218	14	608.0	35,734	610.1
Washington	73	1	359.6	20,374	358.3
Wayne	17	0	56.7	29,927	56.8
Webster	11	1	431.4	2,607	421.9
Wheeler	9	0	113.8	7,855	114.6
White	94	3	296.0	30,798	305.2
Whitfield	283	7	270.4	104,628	270.5
Wilcox	98	13	1114.9	8,635	1134.9
Wilkes	32	1	319.6	9,777	327.3
Wilkinson	65	4	728.8	8,954	725.9
Worth	210	19	1042.6	20,247	1037.2
	17,137	765		4,948,281	346.3

Abrams Counties:

County	Positive Cases	Deaths	DPH Case Rate	2019 Population Estimates	TIGC Case Rate Calculation
Baldwin	330	25	742.8	44,890	735.1
Bibb	435	24	285.9	153,159	284.0
Calhoun	128	5	2026.3	6,189	2068.2
Chatham	448	21	153.3	289,430	154.8
Clarke	232	13	178.8	128,331	180.8
Clay	35	2	1225.9	2,834	1235.0
Clayton	1132	43	371.3	292,256	387.3
Cobb	2795	146	353.5	760,141	367.7
DeKalb	3305	104	416.7	759,297	435.3
Dougherty	1730	140	1924.3	87,956	1966.9
Douglas	504	22	331.8	146,343	344.4
Fulton	4080	199	371.2	1,063,937	383.5
Gwinnett	3198	121	329.3	936,250	341.6
Hancock	191	22	2331.3	8,457	2258.5
Henry	641	19	267.2	234,561	273.3
Jefferson	29	1	189.4	15,362	188.8
Liberty	67	0	108.2	61,435	109.1
Macon	95	6	731.4	12,947	733.8
Muscogee	564	17	294.3	195,769	288.1
Newton	311	10	276.8	111,744	278.3
Randolph	174	19	2576.3	6,778	2567.1
Richmond	534	19	264.0	202,518	263.7
Rockdale	267	9	281.2	90,896	293.7
Stewart	44	0	717.9	6,621	664.6
Sumter	449	41	1527.3	29,524	1520.8
Talbot	35	1	568.4	6,195	565.0
Taliaferro	1	0	61.3	1,537	65.1
Terrell	211	26	2492.0	8,531	2473.3
Warren	18	0	345.5	5,254	342.6
	21,983	1,055		5,669,142	387.8

Apr 10

1 Comment

Old South-West Coast update

A quick update on the analysis I posted last Saturday comparing the COVID-19 performance of six Republican-led Old South states with the three West Coast states led by Democratic governors:

A week ago, the regional comparison looked like this:

Today, based on the latest data available from all nine states’ public health websites, the regional comparison looks like this:

A week ago, the Old South states already had nearly 6,000 more confirmed cases than the West Coast, but still had fewer deaths. In the six days since I pulled that first batch of data, the numbers of confirmed cases and deaths have increased at a much more rapid pace in the Old South than on the West Coast, which bore the initial brunt of the COVID-19 onslaught.

Confirmed cases are up 74.4 percent across the Old South states versus 54.4 percent on the West Coast. But the change in the death counts is even more dramatic. A week ago, the Old South still trailed the West Coast in that category, but since then COVID-19 deaths across the south have shot up by 121.4 percent versus 80.8 percent in the west; as a result, the Old South now has significantly more deaths than the West Coast.

As I acknowledged in last week’s report, there are several obvious differences between the two regions and their various states. The Old South is both less healthy and more religious than the West Coast; it is plagued by comorbidities that constitute the kind of underlying medical conditions that make people more vulnerable to the virus, and its residents have been slower to give up the kind of large religious gatherings that are now recognized as breeding grounds for COVID-19.

Another obvious difference, though, has been in the public policy approach to tackling the virus. The Democratic governors on the West Coast acted earlier and more decisively than their Republican Old South counterparts to shut down their states, as I detailed in last week’s post.

The current state-by-state results look like this:

Georgia now has the highest COVID-19 infection and mortality rate of any of the Old South states, and is second only to Washington, whose Seattle outbreak was one of the nation’s first epicenters, among the nine states. Georgia’s poor numbers are driven in significant measure by the degree to which the virus has ravaged nearly a dozen counties in deep southwest Georgia.

I hope to flesh out the Georgia situation in another post over the weekend.

Apr 4

2 Comments

A tale of two regions: the Old South and the West Coast tackle COVID-19

It’s probably a little early for this kind of analysis, but our nation’s every-state-for-itself approach to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is already generating some interesting contrasts between different states and even regions of the country.

I’ve been following the differences between Georgia and North Carolina, neighboring southeastern states with nearly identical populations but very different COVID-19 results. North Carolina continues to have substantially fewer confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths — despite performing a great many more tests than Georgia. The principal difference between the two states appears to be political: North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, acted earlier and more decisively to begin closing down his state than his Republican counterpart, Brian Kemp, here in Georgia.

Today I decided to expand that analysis and look at two regions of the country: the West Coast (made up of California, Oregon and Washington) and the Old South (comprised in this analysis of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee). As it happens, these two regions also have very comparable populations: 52.0 million in the Old South versus 51.4 million on the West Coast.

This comparison also gives us the same political split. The West Coast is famously deep blue; all three states have liberal Democratic governors. The Old South is bright red and governed by proudly right-wing politicians.

So how are they doing? Let’s look first at the regional numbers.

The state-by-state numbers look like this:

The West Coast, which suffered the country’s first COVID-19 blows as the virus moved in from China, has actually (as of the numbers available this morning on state websites today) recorded 43 more deaths than the Old South — but significantly fewer confirmed cases. The Old South may have recorded 8.6 percent fewer deaths than the West Coast, but it’s posted 22.6 percent more infections.

Perhaps more telling are the COVID-19 infection and mortality rates, which I’ve calculated using a standard formula: [(Confirmed Cases or Deaths/Population)*100,000].

This is, of course, a complex situation, with a great many variables at work. The Old South starts at a disadvantage to its West Coast counterparts because it is both less healthy and more religious. The higher percentages of comorbidities such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease constitute the kinds of “underlying medical conditions” that make people more vulnerable to COVID-19, and places of worship are among the mass gatherings that are now recognized as natural breeding grounds for the bug. (I’ll try to flesh out these points in a later post, but you can find good rankings on health and religiosity here and here.)

That said, it seems increasingly difficult to argue that politics and public policy choices aren’t playing a significant role in how different parts of the country fare in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The West Coast governors acted well ahead of their Old South counterparts to begin shutting down their states. Indeed, probably the first major American politician to take such action was San Francisco Mayor London Breed; she imposed a shelter-in-place order on March 13 and was joined by other Northern California officials three days later. California Governor Gavin Newsom followed suit on March 19. Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who was confronted with the nation’s first major outbreak in Seattle, banned major gatherings in heavily-populated counties on March 11, and then imposed a full shelter-in-place order on March 23. Governor Kate Brown of Oregon came on board the next day.

Meanwhile, the Old South governors lagged well behind their West Coast counterparts and to a great extent deferred to local officials (only, once they did act, to upend many of the local actions). Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves initially said he had no plans to issue a statewide order but did take to Facebook Live to conduct a prayer session on March 22. Today, his state has among the nation’s highest COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and mortality rates.

Ditto Alabama. There, as the West Coast governors were shutting down their states, Governor Kaye Ivey announced on March 24 she had no plans to issue a statewide order. “We’re not California, we’re not New York, we aren’t even Louisiana,” she said.

Today, her state’s COVID-19 infection and mortality rates are worse than California’s. Both she and Reeves threw in the towel late last week and issued statewide shelter-in-place orders. As did the governors of Florida, Georgia and Tennessee. At this point, South Carolina is the only Old South hold-out.

Notably, the reluctant and belated actions by the southern governors have sowed widespread confusion. Here in Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp justified his turnaround decision to issue a shelter-in-place order with the dubious claim that he had only learned the day before that asymptomatic COVID-19 victims could spread the virus — even though public health officials had been saying as much since February.

That explanation earned him national media scorn (“Georgia Gov. Shows Just How Far Behind The World He Is On Coronavirus,” blared a HuffPost headline), but his shelter-in-place order may have done him at least as much local political damage. One presumably unintended consequence of his order was that — by superseding local ordinances — it reopened Georgia’s Atlantic beaches, including Tybee Island, Jekyll Island and St. Simons.

According to a story in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a Republican member of the Glynn County Commission, Peter Murphy, reacted thusly: “We had carefully considered ways to keep people safe here and the governor’s order has undermined everything we were doing.” Murphy, a retired physician, had led the push to close down the local beaches.

Up the road at Tybee Island, an obviously peeved Mayor Shirley Sessions issued a statement that opened on a decidedly undiplomatic note: “As the Pentagon ordered 100,000 body bags to store the corpses of Americans killed by the Coronavirus, Governor Brian Kemp dictated that Georgia beaches must reopen, and declared any decision-makers who refused to follow these orders would face prison and/or fines.”

Mayor Sessions went on to say bluntly that she and the Tybee Island City Council “do not support” Kemp’s decision and to make clear that — while the beaches themselves might be open — the town-controlled access points and parking lots would remain closed. “At no time,” she said, “has the state designated a single point of contact to orchestrate the implementation of the Governor’s plan.”

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis fared little better when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on Wednesday. Hours after signing that first order, The Tampa Bay Times reported that he “quietly signed another one that appeared to override restrictions put in place by local governments to halt the spread of coronavirus. However, DeSantis on Thursday said the amendment he signed does the reverse, instigating another round of confusion over the intent of his directives.”

Is all this definitive? Probably not. Again, it’s arguably a little early for this kind of analysis. But the data that’s already in is a little hard to ignore.

Watch this space.

Mar 30

Covid-19 seems to be hitting Georgia harder than its neighboring states

Over the weekend I published a post comparing Georgia’s Covid-19 performance with North Carolina’s and wondering out loud why the differences are so dramatic. Today I’ve cast a wider net and put together this table comparing Georgia with its neighboring states.

Clearly, Georgia — at least so far — is being harder hit than its five contiguous neighbors. Only Tennessee has a slightly higher Covid-19 infection rate, and Georgia leads the region in both Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations; even Florida, with twice Georgia’s population, trails Georgia in both those categories.

The question is why? There are obviously a great many variables at work in this situation, but at this point there’s enough data in the pot to warrant a little head-scratching. Even if these southern states are using different protocols to determine who gets tested, we’re left with the fact that Georgia is outpacing its neighbors so dramatically in deaths and hospitalizations.

I’ve got lines out to several contacts in the public health world and hope to gather some informed answers to these questions over the next day or so.

[A note about the data above: The population numbers are 2019 Census Bureau estimates. The raw Covid-19 data came from each state’s respective public health website as of about mid-day today. The infection and mortality rates were calculated by dividing the number of positives or the number of deaths by the population and multiplying the result by 100,000.]

____________

Another interesting chunk of Covid-19 data comes from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. It’s now out with state-by-state projections of how the now infamous Coronavirus curve — or wave — is likely to move across each state and its healthcare system. IHME has developed a computer model that stirs together data on available healthcare resources with testing and mortality rates to date.

The projections for Georgia are grim. IHME’s model predicts that Georgia will hit its “peak resource use” on April 22, when it calculates that the state will be short 755 ICU beds and 1,075 ventilators. It also projects our “deaths per day” will peak the following day, April 23, at 84, and that the state will suffer a total of 2,777 deaths by August 4, 2020.

These projections are generally in line with the performance numbers posted above. North Carolina is projected to hit its peak resource demand on the same day, April 22, but will only be short 278 beds and 676 ventilators; its “deaths per day” are projected to peak at 56, and total deaths by August 4 are forecast at 1,721.

__________

Meanwhile, the Economic Innovation Group, whose work I’ve cited on a number of occasions, is out with a new report focusing on the challenges Covid-19 poses for the country’s most “distressed communities,” many of which are rural. Indeed, the new EIG report echoes and puts meat on the bones of an argument I started making nearly two weeks ago — namely, that Covid-19 represented a “perfect storm” for rural Georgia.

EIG annually assigns “Distressed Community Index” scores to all 3,000-plus counties in the nation, as well as all cities with populations of 50,000 or more. It does this using a formula based on seven socioeconomic factors; a few years back, it named Albany one of the 10 most distressed mid-sized cities in the country.

This new EIG report offers four key takeaways:

The uninsured rate for residents of distressed counties is much higher than those living elsewhere.
Residents of distressed counties are more likely to be elderly and susceptible to complications resulting from coronavirus infection.
Life-threatening health disorders are more prevalent and more dangerous in distressed areas.
Life expectancy is already significantly shorter in economically distressed places.

After fleshing out each of those points, EIG then turns its attention to the state of healthcare systems in distressed communities. It reports that it had analyzed more than a decade’s worth of American Hospital Association (AHA) data and found that distressed communities had seen a 16 percent reduction in the number of hospital beds between 2006 and 2017. This report doesn’t offer a state- or county-level breakdown, but rural Georgia has almost certainly suffered that level of loss of beds over the past decade or so.

Mar 28

TIGC Covid-19 March 28 Round-Up

Random Questions and Observations on Covid-19:

Why are the results from Georgia and North Carolina so different? The two states have nearly identical populations — 10.6 million for Georgia versus 10.5 million for North Carolina, according to 2019 Census Bureau estimates — but have very different Covid-19 results so far. I’ve been watching this for a while, thinking the numbers might even out. They haven’t. As of today’s morning report from both states’ public health agencies, North Carolina has tested more than 50 percent more people than Georgia but found less than half as many “positives” as Georgia, and with only a fraction of the hospitalizations and deaths, as this table shows. The question is why. There are obviously a lot of variables at play, but the two states probably have a lot more in common than not. Based on news reports I’ve read, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, seems to have acted earlier than his Georgia counterpart, Republican Brian Kemp — but not that much earlier. We’re probably going to have to wait for the smoke to clear to develop a truly useful analysis of this, but these differences are worth keeping an eye on. It’d be interesting to see the AJC and the Charlotte Observer collaborate on a tick-tock plotting state and maybe major local actions across a timeline.
Like Sherman, Covid-19 continues its march through Georgia. As of today’s late-morning report from the Georgia Department of Public Health, Covid-19 has now been found in 108 of Georgia’s 159 counties. As this map shows, the areas that have so far avoided reporting positive tests are almost entirely rural, including a swath of sparsely populated counties through east-central and southeast Georgia and another group of counties in west Georgia that somehow haven’t yet been pulled into the orbit of the Albany hot spot. While the bulk of the positive tests and deaths are in Metro Atlanta, the rate of infection and Covid-19 deaths is much higher in South Georgia, as the table below shows. Indeed, if you focus on Dougherty County and its six contiguous counties, the Covid-19 infection rate and death rate are, respectively, 6.7 times and 20 times that of TIGC’s Metro Atlanta region.
Using smartphones to gauge mobility in the face of Covid-19. One of the more interesting chunks of data to surface in the Covid-19 pandemic has come from a company called Unacast. Unacast uses location tracking data from smartphones to track how far users travel each day and aggregates that data to see what that can tell us about whether people are following the guidance of their state and local leaders and limiting their local travel. The data seems to lag by a few days and it’s still early, but it’s still interesting. As of today’s report, four of the five best-behaving counties in Georgia are in Metro Atlanta — Forsyth, Dawson, Cherokee and Fulton counties. The other top-five county was Clay County, which ranked second and had slashed its “average distance traveled” by 39 percent. Clay County sits hard on the Alabama line in southwest Georgia, on the edge of the Albany blast zone, but has yet to report a single positive Covid-19 test. You have to wonder if everybody in that county hasn’t gone inside and shut all their doors and windows. You can find the Unacast data here. Scroll down until you find the U.S. map, then click on Georgia and, when that map comes up, click on your county and wait for the data to come up. It’s a little slow and clunky, but still useful.
Covid-19’s economic toll may be tougher on rural Georgia than Metro Atlanta. The great recession hit Metro Atlantans harder than their rural Georgians. That reality showed up first in IRS data and in total personal income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and later in a BEA report on county-level gross domestic product. As Covid-19 began to spread, I found myself thinking it might be tougher on rural Georgia. If the Great Recession hit Metro Atlanta harder, it recovered faster and has since widened its economic, education and health gap with rural Georgia; rural Georgia has generally lost population and seen its local economies contract, which, I figured, left it in a weakened position to deal with a global pandemic. Now comes Politico with a really good piece fleshing out my general concerns. It’s worth reading.
While the Covid-19 data is still developing day-by-day, there are already some interesting oddities and riddles that are worth noting and wondering about:
- College towns. One early theory was that college towns would be hard hit, given their population of young people who still think they’re invincible. Well, yes and no. Clarke County, home of the University of Georgia, had 35 cases as of mid-day Saturday, just over half of the 67 reported by Carroll County, home of West Georgia College. Those weren’t all that surprising. The bigger riddles were Baldwin County (home of Georgia College and State University) with only two cases and Bulloch County (Georgia Southern) with a big goose-egg so far. I haven’t found data on the number of tests given in each county, but both Baldwin and Bulloch are large enough that you’d have to think they’d conducted a fair number of tests.
- Bartow County. Other than Albany, Bartow County, just of I-75 north of Metro Atlanta, has emerged as the state’s second-hottest hot spot. As of Saturday, Bartow County, with a population of about 106,000, had reported 116 cases, the sixth-most in the state, and its infection rate was second only to Dougherty County. I am, I believe, reliably informed that the outbreak traced back to a large community gathering in Cartersville, but I haven’t found any published reporting on it and am going to hold off on the details for the time being.
- Taliaferro County. This tiny, impoverished county of about 1,700 people might be considered a prime target for Covid-19. It’s located about a hundred miles east of Atlanta on I-20 and a far piece from any major healthcare facilities. As it’s worked out so far, it’s one of only two counties on that route between Atlanta and Augusta that still hasn’t reported a positive Covid-19 test (neighboring Warren County is the other). One likely reason is a paucity of testing in the county, but another could be an early decision by the local school superintendent, Allen Fort. As Jim Galloway reported nearly two weeks ago, Fort didn’t wait for guidance from Governor Kemp or anybody else; he acted on his own and sent all his students home. In doing so, he may have flattened the curve in his little county.

Stay tuned. I’ll follow up with more early next week.

Apr 8

1 Comment

Trump says America is ‘FULL.’ Tell that to Rural Georgia.

(Note: I wrote this yesterday afternoon and decided to sleep on it and give it a fresh read-through this morning. In the process, I got scooped by The New York Times, which is leading this morning’s web edition with a terrific story on this same issue at https://nyti.ms/2VyTbam.)

Lately President Trump has taken to proclaiming that the United States is “full.” He said it a few times over the last few days and has tweeted it at least a couple of times, including Sunday.

Well, not really.
Let me say here that I know full well that this notion is entirely ludicrous and will no doubt subject me to all manner of ridicule, much of it probably deserved. Truth is, I’m not really suggesting anything specific. I’m not even sure what a specific recommendation would look like.
But …
The truth is that a core problem afflicting rural America is population loss. Here in Georgia, whole regions are hollowing out. In 2017, 71 of Georgia’s 159 counties recorded more deaths than births. All but one, Glynn County, were rural.
Georgia has 33 counties with populations of less than 10,000 people. Of those, only five posted any population gains at all over the five-year period 2013 through 2017 (the most recent for which the U.S. Census Bureau has posted estimates). And of the five that did grow, only two managed to grow more than one percent – for the entire five-year period.
The 16 counties that make up the southwestern-most corner of Georgia lost more than 9,000 people in that five-year period, or 3.4 percent of their population. Only Lee County, which has evolved as the white-flight county north of Albany and Dougherty County, posted a gain (2.6 percent) for that five-year period; the other 15 all lost population.
Dougherty County, historically the economic, cultural and political center of Southwest Georgia, is bleeding population; in the 2013-2017 span, it lost 5.5 percent of its population, or more than 1,000 people a year.
It shouldn’t need to be said that losing population is generally not a good thing. The pattern in rural Georgia is that young people leave, especially if they have a college education. Population decline naturally shrinks the consumer base, and that leads to weakened sales and property tax revenues. It’s no exaggeration to suggest that some areas of rural Georgia are now in a death spiral.
Could it be that we have two problems here that might help solve one another?
Again, I know this is nuts, for a whole host of reasons. Neither Trump nor his loyal Republican Southern governors (who preside over many of the worst rural disaster areas in the country) would even begin to entertain a strategy of deliberately importing, say, caravans of people from Mexico and Central America to dying rural communities in South Georgia. What’s more, the vast majority of those counties voted overwhelmingly for Trump, and it’s a sure bet these are the folks who favor building that wall, even if we have to pay for it.
All that said, it’s worth noting that, to some degree, people from outside the U.S. are already finding their way to struggling rural communities, even as locals move away. Probably the most dramatic example in Georgia is Stewart County, which is one of those 16 counties in deep southwest Georgia.
Over the five-year period form 2013 through 2017, according to Census Bureau data, 552 locals moved out of Stewart County, and there were 122 more deaths than births. But 479 people from outside the United States moved into Stewart County. (Note to self: Find out what the heck’s happening in Stewart County.)
For that 16-county Southwest Georgia region, international in-migration is about the only positive trend going. For the period 2013-through-2017, literally every one of those 16 counties suffered a loss of domestic population – locals moving out. Half that group had at least some international in-migration. Altogether, the 16-county region lost 13,515 domestic residents and got back about one-tenth of that – 1,332 people – in international migrants.
As a region, Southwest Georgia is still reporting more births than deaths, but the margin is narrowing. Eleven of the 16 counties posted more deaths than births for the 2013-through-2017 period, and not one of the 16 is experiencing anything that could be considered a positive trend in its birth-to-death ratio.
As this graph shows, these trends have been a long time developing. The number of births in the region began to drop precipitously in 2007, and the number of deaths began a slower climb in 2011. If the current trends continue, these lines will cross within a few years.

SW GA Births & Deaths 1994-2017.jpg
It will, of course, take a lot more than new population growth to revitalize rural Georgia’s struggling counties and communities. But without that new population, it’s not clear that much else will matter.

For the third time in this piece, I know what I’m suggesting here is crazy and has less than zero chance of happening, in any form or fashion. But for South Georgia and much of the rest of rural America, the only thing that might be crazier is to do nothing. For these areas, it’s way past time to start thinking outside the box.

(Notes: The data in this post was drawn primarily from two sources. The population data came from a recent update by the USDA’s Economic Research Service of U.S. Census Bureau county-level estimates. The data from the Births & Deaths chart immediately above was pulled from the Georgia Department of Health’s OASIS system. The 16 counties included in the 16-county Southwest Georgia region referenced in this piece are: Baker, Calhoun, Clay, Decatur, Dougherty, Early, Grady, Lee, Miller, Mitchell, Quitman, Randolph, Seminole, Stewart, Terrell, and Webster.)

Connecting the Dots: Health, Education, Economics and Politics in Rural Georgia.