Even though more Americans are getting vaccinated against Covid-19, inoculation rates remain significantly depressed in some conservative and rural parts of the country.
More Republicans are opting to get vaccinated, but many remain hesitant due to the polarizing rhetoric that has persisted throughout the coronavirus pandemic, according to research released Monday by Citizen Data. Vaccine hesitancy is particularly high in rural, conservative areas, the nonpartisan research organization found.
Citizen Data's analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Census Bureau data found that vaccine hesitancy is most severe in parts of Georgia, Virginia and West Virginia. And by folding in its own ideology modeling, the research group determined a hesitancy score (0 for least hesitant to 100 for most hesitant) by media market.
At the top of the list is Dothan, Ala., a city of 261,000 that borders Georgia, with a vaccine hesitancy score of 100. Citizen Data determined 3 in 10 adults there are considered "rural conservative" and just 6 percent of its overall adult population is vaccinated.
The rest of the "most hesitant" list includes: Harrisonburg, Va.; Roanoke and Lynchburg, Va.; Albany, Ga.; Clarksburg and Weston, W.Va.; North Platte, Neb.; Macon, Ga.; Charlottesville, Va.; Amarillo, Texas; and Springfield, Mo.
Source: Citizen Data
Although these areas and others continue to see vaccine aversion from conservatives, polling conducted in April by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows more Republicans are becoming amenable to it.
As of last month, 55 percent of Republicans surveyed said they had already received at least one dose or planned on getting vaccinated as soon as possible — an increase of 9 percentage points from March. Meanwhile the percentage of Republicans who said they would "definitely not" get vaccinated decreased from 29 percent in March to 20 percent in April.
Democrats remained the most enthusiastic about the vaccine, with 80 percent saying in April they had already received at least one dose or planned on getting it soon. This is only a slight increase from 79 percent in March.
Independents also saw a small increase in vaccination enthusiasm, from 57 percent in March to 59 percent in April.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.