A divide has opened up in America, between states that have done a good job vaccinating as many of their citizens as possible and those who are falling behind. Many noted this disparity as Independence Day rolled around, when the country as a whole fell three points behind President Joe Biden's ambitious goal to get at least one vaccine shot into the arms of 70 percent of adult Americans. Hitting only 67 percent is still a monumental achievement (more than two-thirds), to be sure. But a lot of media focus was on the fact that many individual states have indeed reached the 70 percent goal, while others hadn't even gotten to 60 percent. But what was largely missing in all this commentary was the stark fact of the political divide.

To put it bluntly, blue states -- almost all of them, with only a few exceptions -- are doing a great job. All the states with the worst records are red states. There are a few in the middle (some purple states, some red states, and three bluish states), but this divide is so obvious and notable that it's kind of a mystery why more people haven't pointed it out.

Don't believe me? From a vaccine tracking page in the Washington Post which shows which states are where (percentage-wise) comes a chart showing how each state is doing (the chart titled: "When states will vaccinate 70% of adults at current rate" -- and it's worth mentioning that the article itself is not behind the paywall, so anyone can see it). It shows where each state currently is and how long it is projected until the other states hit the 70 percent goal. From the chart, here is the list of states who have already met the goal, in roughly descending order of the percentage they have achieved:

Vermont
Hawai'i
Massachusetts
Connecticut
Maine
New Mexico
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
Maryland
Washington
California
Rhode Island
New Hampshire
Washington D.C.
New York
Delaware
Illinois
Colorado
Minnesota
Virginia
Oregon

Twenty-one states, all of them either solid blue or bluish-purple (New Hampshire, maybe Pennsylvania and New Jersey as well...). Not a single red state in the bunch.

Now here's the bottom of that list, the states which haven't even gotten to 60 percent (the bottom two haven't even gotten to 50 percent), also in roughly descending order of adults vaccinated:

North Carolina
Ohio
Montana
Oklahoma
Indiana
Missouri
North Dakota
South Carolina
Idaho
Arkansas
Tennessee
West Virginia
Alabama
Wyoming
Louisiana
Mississippi

Sixteen states, all of them either ruby-red or a very reddish shade of purple (North Carolina, Ohio, Montana, and maybe West Virginia to give Joe Manchin his due). But not a single solid-blue Democratic state is to be found on that list.

The remaining 13 states in the middle (over 60 percent but below 70) are also either purple or red, for the most part. The only three which could be called blue (or bluish-purple) are Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan.

Personally, I saw this mapped out in plenty of news reports over the holiday weekend. But almost nobody pointed out the painfully obvious -- that when mapped out state by state, the resulting map is almost the same as a map of Electoral College results from the past few elections. There simply are no outliers. The division is pretty stark and pretty hard to miss, but still few seem to have drawn the obvious conclusion.

I wondered why this is, and I could only come up with two possible explanations. The first is reporters living inside their own comfort silos. A general reporter or a pandemic/medical reporter doesn't go looking for political answers, for the most part. And the political reporters don't get assigned stories about the pandemic and vaccination efforts -- except when politics intersects with the effort, as with Biden's arbitrary goal. But even then they're not all that observant.

The other explanation I came up with seems to make more sense, but I truly doubt there's really a huge conspiracy to do this, in reality. If the news media really did pick up on the story and run with it, blaring: "Blue states reach herd immunity, red states fall way behind," then it is just going to make it all the harder for the red states to ever catch up. Getting vaccinated is already political, with Republican voters refusing vaccines at a much higher rate than independents or Democrats. Rubbing everyone's noses in this fact is just going to make the tribalism worse -- which is why the news media might be shying away from such stories. They know it would be counterproductive to the national goal of achieving herd immunity to make a big deal out of it. But again, it's pretty far-fetched to think that all the media came to this same conclusion and decided to actively bury the connection and scrub all politics from the reporting.

So I am left with my initial reaction: maybe they just missed it. Maybe these stories will eventually start appearing, as the divide becomes more and more obvious. The chart this data came from shows a timeline of when each state can be expected to hit the 70 percent mark. Eight states aren't even projected to do so this calendar year. The worst state -- Mississippi -- isn't projected to do so until a full year from now. So there will likely be a whole lot of time for the media to wake up and realize this connection.

Or perhaps they'll figure it out if the delta variant causes massive hotspots (as is currently happening in Missouri) -- and each and every one of those hotspots is in a solid Republican state. Sooner or later it's going to become pretty plain to see that blue states are just safer places to live in right now than the red states are.

The real conclusion and (hopefully) the lesson which will be drawn, afterwards, is that it is just monumentally stupid to politicize a viral pandemic, in any way. Donald Trump is guilty of a lot of things, but making mask-wearing (and then, later, getting vaccinated) some sort of political statement was just downright depraved. Trump could easily have taken a different route, and claimed that he had personally and singlehandedly created all the vaccines, so any follower of his worth his or her salt would immediately get the shots to prove their loyalty to him. Things would have been much different now, if he had chosen this route. MAGA-hatted people at his rallies would probably even proudly wave their vaccination cards at Trump, to show their loyalty. Stranger things have happened.

But of course, none of that did happen, and it won't. Trump encouraged his followers to embrace the same anti-science views he did, which they eagerly adopted. That chart -- and all the maps showing which states are doing better than others -- is the direct result. While states like Vermont, Hawai'i, and Massachusetts have surged past 80 percent of adults vaccinated, some of the red states are just never going to catch up. This is what politicizing vaccinations does, whether the media has figured it out yet or not.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant