Analysis | Please stop the macabre fantasies about how covid deaths might change politics – The Washington Post
Whenever I write about how the effects of the coronavirus pandemic overlap with partisan politics, the same whispers can be heard: The Republicans are killing their voters! Good riddance!
That most of those who are unvaccinated are Republican and that it is Republican counties that are disproportionately losing residents to covid-19 has spurred a macabre bit of political analysis. Surely if more Republicans are dying, that could help shift the national political picture more to the left, no? Republican rhetoric on the virus is undercutting their own political base.
My first response to this is: Stop. My second response to this is: Anyway, no.
The United States has seen nearly 900,000 deaths from covid-19 since the pandemic began — at least, given that experts think the actual toll has been undercounted. That’s certainly a lot of people, a death toll that pushed the number of deaths in the country to a record high in 2020. But in the scale of all U.S. residents? It’s about a quarter of a percentage point.
If those deaths were distributed across the United States’ 3,100 or so counties, it’s about 290 in each place. That’s not many, by itself an indicator that the effects would be small. But, of course, U.S. counties come in a wide range of population sizes. Counties in New York City saw far, far more deaths than many other counties — than some states.
So let’s look at the question at a county level. How would the death toll in each county have affect the statewide presidential vote in 2020?
To answer this, we have to first consider an unknown variable: To what extent are deaths actually centered among Republicans? If we look at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how those deaths have been distributed by age, we get a hint. Deaths from covid have been disproportionately among older Americans, a population that’s much more heavily Republican. If we compare those deaths with 2020 American National Election Study data on party distribution and then do a little math, we see that — excluding all other factors — we would assume that slightly more Republicans than Democrats had died of covid.
Since we’re considering how the 2020 vote would have changed, I only used deaths since the election. After all, the deaths before the election are already baked into the results. So applying our uniform assessment of the party split of the decedents on a county level and then tallying the results for every county in every state (except Alaska, where results are tallied differently), we see the effects of the post-November 2020 pandemic deaths.
Almost nothing. You can see that below; the arrows (red for states that preferred Donald Trump in 2020 and blue for ones that supported President Biden) showing the change in vote margin before and after our death toll barely budge.
On average, state results shifted 0.02 percentage points to the right. Essentially, each state moved slightly more toward the candidate it already preferred. Using this estimate, no county moved more than 1.3 percentage points in margin. No counties at all flipped from red to blue.
That was all things being equal, of course. The available data suggests that Republicans are more at risk due to lower vaccination rates. So if we assume that 55 percent of deaths were among Republicans, how does that change the math?
Not a lot. Now the average shift among states is 0.02 percentage points to the left. No state flips. The biggest county-level shift in margin is 1.4 points to the left — and no counties actually go from supporting one candidate to the other.
In fact, if we make a wildly unsupported assumption that every death since November 2020 has been a Republican, we can run the same analysis. And the effects don’t change much.
If every death since Nov. 3, 2020, was a Republican, the average state-level shift is 0.4 percentage points to the left. The biggest shift is in New Mexico, obviously not changing the results of that Biden-voting state. At the county level, the biggest movement is 3.2 points to Biden — but only three counties in the country would actually flip. (If you’re curious, those are New York’s Orange and Warren counties and Rice County, Minn.) The effect of 634,000 Republicans dying is that the 2020 election looks much as it did previously.
On average, even if every covid death was of a Republican, the reduction in Republican votes in a county would equal about 2.4 percent of the total number of Democratic voters in the county. So in a county with 10,000 Democrats and 11,000 Republicans, the Republican advantage would fall from 1,000 to 760 votes. Only in close elections even at the county level would that make a difference.
In reality, of course, the effects here would be even smaller. After all, not every person who died of covid-19 was old enough to vote, nor was every death of someone who was registered to vote. Not only is our calculus rough, it’s also inherently overestimating the importance of those deaths.
So that’s that. There will likely be no significant effect, particularly at the national level, from the scale of loss during the coronavirus pandemic. Perhaps that gives people an apparently needed extra reason not to look for some silver lining in a mass mortality event.
