Americans didn’t wait for their governors to tell them to stay home

But, at least on the front end of this crisis, Americans weren’t deciding what to do based on politics. Americans living in red states appear to have taken the crisis plenty seriously; data shows that residents there were staying home well before their governors issued stay-at-home orders.

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Cuebiq, a private data company, assessed the movement of people via GPS-enabled mobile devices across the U.S.1 If you look at movement data in a cross-section of states President Trump won in the southeast in 2016 — Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Kentucky — 23 percent of people were staying home on average during the first week of March. That proportion jumped to 47 percent a month later across these six states.

If defying social distancing orders were really a political statement, you’d think that the southeast would be a hotbed for dissent. Yet people in the six states we examined changed their behavior around mid-March, before the states’ official stay-at-home orders. In fact, about 90 percent of the total change between early March and mid-April had occurred in the week before the stay-at-home orders were passed in each state.

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