A new study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology offers something else to worry about. Turns out there’s a direct correlation between fast-food restaurants and the prevalence of… Trump supporters.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, or even unexpected. After all, the former president himself famously subsists on Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets. One of his White House aides reported recently that a presidential dining room was splattered with ketchup after the incumbent heard his attorney general say on TV, right after the 2020 election, that the voting had been fair and square.
Still, the survey results were not exactly what the Georgia Tech researchers were expecting. They had carefully plotted the locations of 700,000 fast-food chain outlets by county and then overlaid that map with social and economic data.
There turned out to be no significant relationship between the density of chain restaurants in a given county and its household wealth or racial makeup. Same for the percentage of college graduates, the urban-rural balance and a host of other demographic markers.
Yet one correlation did hold up: how a county voted in the 2020 election. Fast-food America, it turns out, is Trump country. In places where he won his biggest margins, nearly 40 percent of all restaurants are chain-owned. In the least Trumpy counties, it’s little more than half that.
