Perhaps it is taking the politicization of the pandemic to an extreme, but people are wondering if differential death rates could change the outcome of the November presidential election. This article in Politico is particularly dumb, however, because it notes that older voters are disproportionately likely to vote for Trump without even mentioning that African-Americans are even more disproportionately likely to vote for Biden. Both groups are dying in higher numbers than the rest of the population. So, which candidacy benefits? To even begin to answer that, you’d first have to acknowledge that African-Americans are also an at-risk group.
The whole piece is premised on what looks like a badly flawed study that was published in a public administration journal called Administrative Theory & Praxis. And their numbers are pretty underwhelming. Even assuming a much higher death rate than we’re presently seeing, they predict “11,000 more Republicans than Democrats who are 65 and older could die before the election in both Michigan and North Carolina” and “in Pennsylvania, should the state return to using only social distancing to fight infections, it could lose over 13,000 more Republican than Democratic voters in that age category.
Four years ago, we saw some really close election results measuring in the tens of thousands in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. So, anything that would cause 10,000 fewer Republicans than Democrats to turn out in a state would have the potential to change an outcome in 2020. But those numbers wouldn’t have changed the result in these states in 2016. And, as I’ve said, this doesn’t account for higher death rates among younger blacks, which would minimize the effect.
Trump is definitely going to get a lot of his voters killed. He already has. He’s also gotten a lot of Biden voters killed, and that will continue. It’s this feature that should cost him the election, not the differential between the two groups.
It would be the person over 65 who saw their neighbor die as much as the overall reduction in population.
I think it’s the fact that he’s alienating older voters by scaring them to death with his constant pushing to restart the election in a way that everyone knows isn’t safe. He may lose a share of his support among his most reliable voters. It wouldn’t necessarily take much, particularly since these are people who won’t stay home. They’ll show up and pull the lever for Biden.
Yes, this. To be blunt, the number of deaths is too small to have a significant effect on an electorate of 135 million (in 2016) voters.
What’s not too small to have an effect is the overall demographic shift of the past four years, with roughly 12 million (disproportionately older, whiter, wealthier, more conservative) people dying and roughly 16 million (disproportionately younger, browner, poorer, more liberal) people becoming eligible to vote.
All things being equal, changes in the electorate of that magnitude do make it harder for Trump to win this year. Of course, all things are *never* equal: Trump likely benefits from being a new incumbent, from having presided over a relatively strong economy, and possibly from being president in a time of crisis.
Indeed. Look at Georgia: the premature ‘opening’ will no doubt disproportionately impact Atlanta.
maybe some of them will take Trump’s medical advice and start mainlining bleach.
Quackery. Nicole Wallace noted Trump has now called his latest expertise about using disinfectants and light merely sarcasm. Problem is it took him over twelve hours to say anything. Well, he is a very stable genius so he likely meant every word of it. Tide pods may be better than Lysol though, I suspect. Dumb ass.