The discussion of who should receive the first tranche of COVID-19 inoculations has raised the question of who, exactly, are essential workers. Nurses and teachers, of course; supermarket and packing house and farmworkers, certainly; bus drivers and letter carriers, natch; and so on down the line.

But where, exactly, are such workers to be found? The answer, disproportionately, is states that voted for Donald Trump.

An article in Sunday’s New York Times included a table entitled "Share of Workers in Essential and Frontline Jobs, by State," which put states with the highest percentage of such workers at the top and those with the lowest share at the bottom.

The state with the highest share? Mississippi, at 75 percent. Numbers two through 12, in order, were Arkansas, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Alabama, Ohio, Iowa, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. All were clustered at roughly the same share; number 12 South Carolina logged in at 73 percent.

The bottom dozen saw New York with the lowest percentage (66 percent), and working upward on the chain came Nevada, Colorado, Hawaii, Florida, Utah, Massachusetts, Maryland, California, Washington, and Oregon. That is, states with high shares of workers with college or advanced degrees, or workers clustered in industries like banking, tech, and tourism that either have higher shares of workers who can perform their labors at home or are heavily unemployed (tourism).

The Times piece didn’t correlate this list to how states voted last month, but the list clearly reflects the education and occupation gap that figures so prominently in contemporary American politics. It also reflects the rural-urban gap, which significantly overlaps that between education levels. Below New York came the District of Columbia, whose share of essential workers (53 percent) was far below that of any state, though I suspect was representative of many major cities. (Lobbying, it turns out, is not essential work.)

By occupation, then, the Americans most likely to be at risk from the coronavirus live in red states. The lower population density of most of those states, however, tends to diminish those risks. Still, the Trump administration’s failure to ensure that frontline and essential workers have been protected from the pandemic has particularly endangered many of its strongest supporters—though its lies about the pandemic (and about much else) have helped keep them in the Republican column.