Coronavirus is dividing blue cities from their red states

The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic is opening a new front in the long-running conflict between blue cities and red states.

Across a wide array of states with Republican governors, many of the largest cities and counties -- most of them led by Democrats -- are moving aggressively to limit economic and social activity. State officials, meanwhile, are refusing to impose the strictest statewide standards to fight the virus.

A growing chorus of big-city officials in red states like Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and Missouri are now urging their governors to establish uniform statewide rules, arguing that refusing to do so undercuts their local initiatives by increasing the risk the disease will cluster in neighboring areas from which it can easily reinfect their populations.

"We need a statewide 'safer at home' order," says Clay Jenkins, the county judge -- in effect, the county supervisor -- in Texas' Dallas County. The refusal by Gov. Greg Abbott to issue such a directive, Jenkins told me, in an argument echoed by many other municipal officials in red states, "makes it more likely that we will run out of hospital beds, and our curve will be steeper, more people will get sick at once."