Republicans: Virus is no Biggie

Republicans don't just have a different opinion of Trump than do Democrats. 

They have a different opinion about the virus.

Click: YouGov

CBS/YouGov Poll: 

176,000 people have died from the COVID virus. 57% of Republicans said that the number of deaths is acceptable and 73% said the American response to the virus was "going well."

Peter Lemieux is a college classmate who went on to MIT to study Political Science, and later taught there. Like yesterday's guest post political scientist, Sandford Borins, Peter Lemieux also has an active blog where he shares his work, which he describes as "political analysis for the numerically inclined": https://www.politicsbythenumbers.org  

This blog normally focuses on message and narrative. Peter Lemieux looks at numerical data. He models election outcomes by looking at net favorables, past election results, numerical trends. His blog pages are filled with charts and graphs. No pictures.

From Peter Lemieux's blog

Readers might check out his blog. Some readers will be thrilled by it, since he generally offers good news to Democrats, writing that the current trends strongly favor Biden over Trump. He considers Republican incumbent Senators Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, and Martha McSally to have a predicted vote below 50%--not a big surprise, perhaps, to close followers of politics. But he says the same for Mitch McConnell, too.

Guest post by Peter Lemieux.

My first reaction was to look at the difference in terms of who has contracted the corona virus and who has died. There's no doubt that the virus has hit communities of color much harder than it has affected whites. The CDC reports that Black, Hispanic and Native Americans have seen 2.6-2.8 times more cases than whites, are 4.6-5.3 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 1.1-2.1 times more likely to die. So we might expect that Republicans simply have less personal experience with the virus and might take it less seriously. I'll return to this below.

Peter Lemieux

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-race-ethnicity.html

Next there's the "bubble" phenomenon. FoxNews viewers and other consumers of right-wing media were treated to a barrage of programming accusing mainstream outlets of jacking up numbers and creating hysteria about the virus to undermine Donald Trump. For instance, Margaret Sullivan, the former NY Times ombudsman now at WaPo and one of my favorite commentators, wrote this summary of a survey by the Kennedy School:

https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/April19_FORMATTED_COVID-19-Survey.pdf
"Those who relied on Fox or, say, radio personality Rush Limbaugh, came to believe that vitamin C was a possible remedy, that the Chinese government created the virus in a lab, and that government health agencies were exaggerating the dangers in the hopes of damaging Trump politically, a survey showed."


https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-data-is-in-fox-news-may-have-kept-millions-from-taking-the-coronavirus-threat-seriously/2020/06/26/60d88aa2-b7c3-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html

In contrast Republicans who relied on mainstream media were no less informed and no less likely to take steps to protect themselves than other Americans.

So it's certainly likely that a good chunk of that 57% who think the death toll is "acceptable" probably also think that the figures are way overstated.



Then there is the "granny" issue. The worst offender in this regard is probably Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick who back in March said

“No one reached out to me and said, ‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-19-texas-official-suggests-elderly-willing-die-economy/2905990001/

For Republicans like Patrick, reopening the economy is more important than whether more old people die, since they'll be dying soon anyway.

Now let me return to the racial question.

A purely cynical perspective would suggest that Republicans are not unhappy about coronavirus deaths because it's just the "right" people who are dying, namely people of color and implicitly Democrats. Surely that racist perspective underpins the beliefs of some of those who answered "acceptable" to the question about COVID deaths.

But there is also the question of exposure to the toll of the virus and whether it varies by party. A WaPo poll in June found that 31% of Black respondents said they knew someone who had died from the virus compared to 17% of Hispanics and just 9% of whites.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/almost-one-third-of-black-americans-know-someone-who-died-of-covid-19-survey-shows/2020/06/25/3ec1d4b2-b563-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html

Finally, there's the fact that nearly every survey response these days is intensely colored by partisanship. Asking whether the country is better off today than four years ago is essentially asking your opinion about the Trump Administration. While majorities of voters have consistently told pollsters they disapprove of the President's job while in office, most Republicans approve. The figure isn't as high as the 96% or so that Trump routinely claims, but it's certainly in the 80-90% range. So it's not surprising that 70-75% of Republicans think the US is better off than four year ago and give the Administration high marks for its handling of the economy and the virus.

Unemployment may be at 10-15% overall, but it's especially concentrated in a few industries like travel, entertainment, restaurants, etc., where employees with Republican sympathies are rare.

So, yes, we are "living in different realities." Republicans see the virus as an attack by China and reports on cases and deaths as wildly overblown to damage Trump. They are also much less likely to have had personal experience with COVID. And, for those who agree with Lt. Gov. Patrick, the death toll is a reasonable price to pay for reopening the economy.