New York is a sea of red counties outside big cities. Even in deep-blue Gotham, there are pockets of deep red. Visit Brighton Beach and Borough Park in Brooklyn. Howard Beach and Breezy Point in Queens. Throgs Neck in The Bronx. Or pretty much anywhere in Staten Island: There you’ll step into red America, where American flags fly high, police officers are heroes and no one refers to a new mother as a “birthing person.”

It’s not just New York. California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom survived his recall election in a landslide. But 3.3 million Californians voted to remove him, more than the entire population of the second-most-Republican state, Utah.

Meanwhile, the nation may already be realigning itself, with conservatives from blue areas moving to red ones. But a formal separation effectively means conservatives lose the big cities, which tend to be heavily liberal.

It’s not just COVID regulations that divide us, of course. There’s much more. But the truth is that electorates change, issues of importance change, demographics change.