I doubt I’m the only person who has thought of this, but the vast majority of COVID deaths are attributed to political conservatives, the vast majority of which are Republicans. With the country so evenly divided, a 5% change in the voters might swing an election to the lib-Dems. With 800,000 COVID deaths, granted that many of them are underaged or non-voters, could there be an impact on close elections? Are Democrats sitting back and smiling about the future of their party?
Red graves = blue waves.
(Not me, saw it on Tiktok…)
I think the R’s are trying to make it so that it doesn’t matter what the voter turn out is. I mean hell, they are already a minority and will most likely control both houses in 22.
So no, Covid won’t effect the party.
I don’t think anyone is “sitting back and smiling” about this, but it’s definitely something people are talking about.
In fact, a lot of people I know are using this issue to try to get the Republicans to take COVID more seriously. It’s clear they don’t give a crap about all the people being hurt by it, but maybe just possibly they’ll start doing the right things in order to save themselves in the next election.
So far, that doesn’t seem to be working, though.
So yes, I expect that this will have some impact in the next few elections. I’d rather it had an impact now, but there’s nothing more I can do to affect that. The pro-COVID forces are going to do what they are going to do, and let the chips fall where they may.
But, if this does cost them the next election, I’m absolutely going to say “I told you so!” for many many months afterwards.
I realize that turnout means more than how many registered voters a party has, and Republicans are often better at getting their voters to the polls than Democrats. At the same time, Republican-led state legislatures are passing laws that will make it harder for some people to register and vote. Still, as the number of Republicans fall due to COVID deaths that should hurt their chances of winning close elections unless an equivalent number of Democrats stop voting for some reason. I don’t see landslides happening, but Democrats have to feel good about their chances in the next few elections given that Republicans will have to work even harder to get their voters out to vote… the ones that are still alive.
It goes beyond dying. What I’ve wondered is whether retail workers and medical professionals, especially frontline ones, who’d normally vote Republican will reconsider their votes given who’s giving them a hard time right now. If they do, would it be significant, especially compared to more motivated voters among, say, restauranteurs?
Do frontline retail workers and medical professionals typically vote Republican? I would have expected the same 50/50 split as the country as a whole.
I doubt it, for two reasons.
Prior to the availability of vaccinations, many victims would have been Democratic Party voters. Many people were dying in densely populated New York City, and many of these victims were people of color who worked low-paying front-line jobs. Perhaps now that the vaccines are available many Republican-leaning voters in rural New York are dying, but it’s unlikely they outnumber the number of Democratic Party voters lost in New York City.
The second is how votes are actually counted. Hillary Clinton won more votes than Donald Trump, but she still lost. If Texas lost a lot of voters, it will still vote Republican, and at most they might lose a seat (and therefore an electoral college vote) in redistricting.
Only states where the two parties are at near parity and large numbers of Democrats weren’t killed in the initial wave would see a measurable difference.
So we might actually see an impact in battleground states such as WI, MI, PA and GA, where COVID deaths disproportionately hitting GOP voters could make it harder for the GOP presidential candidate to win.
Of course, this presumes the legislatures in those states won’t simply disqualify enough Dem votes to overcome that disadvantage.
We might, but only if large numbers of people weren’t killed by COVID in, say, Detroit (which leans heavily Democratic, is poor, and is a densely populated city). How do we know more Republicans died in Michigan? Sure, more Republicans are dying there now, but not at the beginning.
So COVID deaths before the vaccine favor Republicans while COVID deaths after the vaccine favor Democrats. Does anyone know the number of COVID deaths before versus after the vaccine became readily available? I’m not finding a graph showing the total number of deaths by month. I believe the first vaccine was initially made available in late August 2020.
By 2024, I’d imagine vaccine resistance and general lack of caution would swing the death ratio more to the red side. And Biden won all four of these states in 2020 despite COVID deaths “favoring” more likely D-voters.
I think that’s a good assumption. I wonder what the death rate would be by then. Immunity (whether from infection or vaccination) doesn’t last forever (so lots of anti-vaxxers will be at risk in the following years), but I imagine the death rate will go down in the future. If only because lots of unvaccinated Republicans will get infected, but most will survive and become at least somewhat resistant for a time that way.
As for the lack of caution, people simply will not keep wearing masks and social distance forever, and I doubt we will ever reach herd immunity. Democrats will get their vaccinations but will remove the masks and distancing. The only (albeit significant) difference between the two groups when it comes to protecting themselves from COVID will be Democrats getting vaccinations and booster shots and Republicans not doing so.
I don’t know. I’m only talking about that portion that does (I didn’t put the comma before “who” deliberately).
There’s lots of charts here:
It’s harder to find a nice chart about how many vaccines were given over time, but one Google search displayed a chart that showed vaccinations started taking off around March of 2021, and began leveling off around May 2021. So by May, it’s probable that most Democrats had been vaccinated.
At the beginning of May, US total deaths were just under 600K, and now they’re at around 830K. It’s hard to figure out the relative proportions of each group by politics, though.
One big thing is, though, the pre-vaccine death toll is fixed, whereas the post-vaccine death toll is open-ended. So even if Republicans have not yet overtaken the disproportionately Democratic deaths of the first few months of the pandemic, if vaccination remains divided along partisan lines, the Republicans have a lot of time left to catch up. If US deaths per day average about 1000/day, that’s about 300k more dead by election day in November 2022, most of whom will likely be Republicans.
I doubt it. Not all of those were voters, and that 800K is spread across a country…a country of over 320 million people Even if we just look at voters, 800K out of 158 or so million voters is a very small percentage. If all the deaths had been in a single state it might make a difference, but spread across the whole country? I doubt it will even be a blip. JMHO and all that.
Now, if you want to make the case that the perception of Covid negative impacts is focused on the Republicans, that might be more meaningful if you can make the case that Independents and on the fence Democrats are more repelled by Republican stances on Covid, but I think it’s mainly a wash. A lot of Americans seem to be fed up with Covid restrictions, so that’s likely to hurt the Dems as much as the Repubs wrt the next election, but that’s just my take on it, and based on my minuscule data set of ‘people I know’.
Whisky Tango Foxtrot?
5% would be a huge swing in election outcomes… but there’s no way to get even remotely close to that from covid deaths. Even if 100% of the deaths were Republicans, there just aren’t that many dead.
Much more significant will be people reacting to the way the two parties have dealt with the pandemic, and changing their voting habits accordingly (which could mean changing their vote, or could mean not voting when they would have before, or voting when they wouldn’t have before). But those changes could go in either direction, so it’s difficult to predict their effect.
This isn’t surprising. While Donny fought against mandates that would also have saved lives but were unpopular with his base, while at the same time promoting untested medicines and treatments, he secretly got the vaccine and the booster because he knows that’s how to avoid getting seriously ill. Since his followers don’t agree with that he has to walk the line of taking credit for the vaccine while opposing any mandates. He’ll occasionally suggest that people be vaccinated, but his devoted followers ignore that and he doesn’t say it loud enough to cause a backlash.
Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker are both isolating with covid. They are both vaxxed, and I’m hoping they both recover soon, but pandemics affect everyone.