More Republicans have died of COVID-19. Does that mean the polls are off? – Roll Call

Doctors and demographers recently noticed another tragic example of how polarization shapes America: The pandemic has killed more people in the nation’s Republican enclaves than its Democratic strongholds. They explain the gap by pointing to Republican resistance to vaccines and the GOP’s more cavalier approach to combating the virus in general. 

Those findings suggest many more Republicans — tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands — have died of COVID-19 than Democrats, leading some to wonder with some morbidity what the political impact will be. Will Democrats, facing the normal midterm election headwinds plus high inflation, do surprisingly well in 2022 for the simple, sad fact that there are fewer Republicans?

Or, to put it another way: Can we expect this partisan mortality shift to show up in the polling data?

A partisan divide

In January, the Pew Research Center found that 33 percent of Republicans had not received a vaccine, compared to 10 percent of Democrats. Another Pew survey that month showed a widening mask gap, with Republicans less likely than Democrats (39 percent vs. 79 percent) to say they wore masks inside stores most or all of the time. 

The disparate approaches have come with a partisan death divide. GOP-run states that lifted lockdowns sooner had higher excess death rates than blue states, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed. Florida and Georgia had more than 200 deaths per 100,000, while New York had 112 per 100,000, New Jersey 73 per 100,000 and Massachusetts 50 per 100,000. “Between August and December 2021, Florida experienced more than triple the number of excess deaths (29, 252) as New York (8,786), despite both states having similar population counts (21.7 million and 19.3 million, respectively),” Steven H. Woolf wrote.