Dem. And GOP Governors Enacted Stay-At-Home Orders On The Same Timeline. But All Holdouts Are GOP
Republican governors have been widely criticized for being slower than their Democratic counterparts in imposing social distancing requirements to halt the spread of the new coronavirus. Some Democratic governors — Govs. Gavin Newsom (California), Andrew Cuomo (New York), J.B. Pritzker (Illinois) and Jay Inslee (Washington) in particular — moved to enact social distancing measures relatively early, in some cases weeks ahead of other states. But this hasn’t been an entirely partisan push — Republican Gov. Mike DeWine (Ohio) also enacted social distancing measures early, declaring “we must be at war” with the virus.
In fact, many of the governors who have responded the fastest, lead states that faced intense outbreaks of the virus much earlier than other states. New York, for instance, is at the epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S. and accounts for nearly half of the country’s reported coronavirus-related deaths with thousands of new cases reported daily.
It makes sense, then, that we see some variation in when states first issued a statewide order to stay at home, but is there an actual partisan split in how Democratic and Republican governors have responded? In looking at the first recorded COVID-19 case in a given state and how many days passed before the governor imposed a statewide “stay at home” or “shelter in place” order, I found a governor’s party affiliation didn’t make a huge difference in when the order was issued.
The median Democratic governor imposed such an order 21 days after the first case appeared and the median Republican governor took 25 days.
The key difference here, of course, is that the eight governors who have yet to impose a statewide order are all Republican.4 Yes, some of those states have partial stay-at-home orders enacted in some cities and counties, but nothing statewide. And each of those states is now well beyond the 25-day time frame of the median Republican-led state. Nebraska, for instance, saw its first case on Feb. 17 — 52 days ago — and still hasn’t imposed a statewide order.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democratic-and-gop-governors-enacted-stay-at-home-orders-on-the-same-timeline-but-all-holdouts-are-republicans/
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