Republican politicians have made the odd choice of going along with the anti-vax trend. That means the death toll weighs more heavily on GOP voters, in addition to demographic factors that might make them more vulnerable anyway. The death numbers certainly feel significant when compared to the numbers thrown around on CNN on election nights. What do we know about the numbers, and how votes are likely to be affected?
Well, take a swing state like Arizona. It has had ~19,500 deaths. Many of those were before the 2020 election, and obviously many of those were not voters.
Even if you assume every one of those was a GOP voter, you are talking about 0.5% of the 2020 turnout.
Clearly change in voter preference based on COVID policy (in either direction) is larger than the effect of actual COVID deaths.
Those GOP politicians have made the calculation that # of voters that prefer a more muted COVID response is greater than the # of voters that will die from that muted response.
ETA: Nationwide total COVID deaths are also less than 0.5% of 2020 presidential turnout.
My cousin called me from cornfield county Ohio yesterday and informed me that his 12 year old grand daughter had Covid, two people in his small town of about 1000 died of Covid last week and two of his close friends had recently recovered from Covid and told him what a rough time they had.
Then I asked him if he was finally going to get vaccinated and he said no. He voted for Trump the first time and abstained from voting the second time. Stupid is as stupid does.
And in many places they are more concerned with the primary anyhow, so this effect is magnified.
However, in the recent California recall Newsom had an effective strategy of saying that a Republican would go backward on Covid protection and vaccine mandates. I’m sure that swung the vote more than the relatively few Republicans who died and did not vote.
“It’s the smart thing to do, so I’m not gonna do it” I really don’t understand these people.
[Moderating]
This is really more of a political discussion. Moving to P&E.
DeSantis won in Florida by fewer than 33,000 votes. Over 51,000 have died from covid there.
No word on how many were republican voters.
I can’t find it again, but I saw a long analysis online trying to estimate how many more Republican voters have died than Democratic voters. The data is weak because Nebraska and Florida stopped released county-level data mid-summer, so the latest toll, many in Republican states, wasn’t properly reflected. But IIRC, he estimated that the excess of Republican voter deaths (not all deaths) was over 100,000.
They’re beginning to realize how bad a strategy denouncing the vaccine was. So, naturally, Democrats are not merely the blame, it’s an actual deliberate tactic.
I’d say the most likely effect will be in Congressional and state legislative races. And this will depend on how aggressive the gerrymandering is done in various red states. A very aggresive gerrymandering will have a large number of districts with a fairly small surplus of R voters, so more Republican voter deaths in those districts could make those districts swing or even slightly blue. This effect will most likely be evident in states where Republicans have been losing their previous comfortable majority, such as Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. But it won’t necessarily happen. It requires an aggressive gerrymander, and there’s no guarantee they’ll do that.