The higher the vote for Trump, the more COVID cases. The more cases, the more deaths.
It isn't just your intuition.
Yesterday's post included a link to the "extremely detailed" report on the 2020 and 2016 presidential election. A close look at the detail at county and precinct level reveals how strongly people cluster into neighborhoods of like-minded people. That fine-grained report on election results combined with hospital and health department data allow people to examine the relationship between voting behavior and the incidence of COVID.
The conclusion is not surprising. It makes sense to think that how people voted in 2020 would be closely related to whether people get vaccinated and whether they follow behavioral practices like mask-wearing and social distancing. Trump downplayed COVID and the Fox/GOP vaccination message is about personal choice amid doubt and criticism of vaccines, masks, and social distancing.
Two websites report on the county-level relationship between votes and COVID:
ACASignups.net: https://acasignups.net
This chart below shows the COVID case rate by counties, with each bar representing the Biden-Trump vote in a ten percent range. The bar on the left marks counties where Biden won 90% to 100% of the vote; on the right where Trump won over 90%. The intermediate bars represent ten percent increments, 80%-90%, 70%-80%, etc.
COVID cases:
The chart below uses the same method for assigning a bar.
COVID deaths:
The chart trend is smooth and it tells a vivid story: the higher the Trump vote, the more COVID sickness and death. At the extremes the death level difference is extreme: Nine-to-one more deaths.
A reasonable objection to these charts would be that the population numbers are not similar, and there are very few counties where the votes are 90%-plus for either candidate, or even 80% to 90%. Those are extreme places and are not generally representative. The charts below even out the population sizes, with each bar representing 10% of the U.S. population, approximately 33 million people. Again, the bars are ranked from left to right, Biden vote to Trump vote, the 10% most Biden counties, the next 10%, up to the 10% most Trump-leaning counties.
COVID cases:
COVID deaths:
The trend line is less smooth, but the pattern is clear, although less extreme. When using large, even sample sizes of 33 million Americans, the difference between the death rates drops from extreme Trump counties having nine times the death rate of extreme Biden counties down to five times the death rate when looking at two pools of 33 million people.
Vaccination rates as of September 18, 2021 show exactly the pattern one might expect. Counties where people voted for Biden have higher vaccination rates than Trump-supporting counties. Again, each bar represents 33 million Americans, showing the lowest Trump-supporting counties (26% or less of the vote) up to the highest Trump-supporting counties (71% or more.)
Readers surely assumed something like this was taking place. What we did not know was the scale.
Using large population numbers, based on county-wide votes, Trump-supporting counties have three-to-five times the COVID death rates as do Biden-supporting counties. In fact, if we incorporate what we saw in yesterday's post, that county data aggregates Trump neighborhoods with Biden ones, county-wide data obscures and softens the relationship between voting and COVID incidence. This is especially true in the middle bars, where counties are a mix of Biden and Trump precincts. The two extreme bars on left and right, where the death rate difference exceeds five times, is a more likely representation of the actual case and death rate skew between Trump areas and Biden areas. In those extreme counties--urban ones like Multnomah (Portland) in Oregon where nearly every neighborhood is strongly pro-Biden, and rural bright red counties like Harney and Malheur in Oregon, where nearly everyone supports Trump--we see the relationship between Biden voters and Trump voters most clearly. Those are in the first two charts.
Whether the "true" skew is best understood as Trump voters having nine times the death rates of Biden voters, or only five times, we now have validation of our intuition and a scale for it.
6 comments:
Trump supporters believed the lie about the election being stolen so there’s little surprise they believe the misinformation about Covid vaccines. The source of the misinformation is coming from the same media that they believe to be true. It is amazing that death of those close supporters does not dissuade them and question their position.
Wondering if there is a correlation between Trump support and belief in an afterlife? Perhaps this corporal existence is not as important and precious to those believing in life ever after?
In deference to the Ivy League fellow commenters…. CORPOREAL!
Not surprising.
In a battle for hearts and minds (and wallets) there are going to be casualties. If it wasn't vaccination it would be something else that would be the battle cry for the MAGA heads. They aren't happy unless they are furious over some imagined outrage or conspiracy.
Remember "fake news", "Q" and so on?
So stupid and tiresome. Adolescent defiance; "you can't make me!", while Republican fundraising is targeted to "fight vaccine tyranny".
Appears to me that, fairly soon, Republicans-aka trumpites-will suffer such a reduction in population that they’ll be losing virtually ALL elections!
I hate to see so many deaths, but maybe enough trumpite deaths will eventually bring us to herd immunity! As fa4 as I know, corpses don’t spread covid.
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