A lot of these elections were very close and I'm wondering
how much of an impact people who died from COVID has had on these races.
I'm talking about specifically the close races.
Well, now we have a little more data to kind of
decipher whether or not Republicans who died of COVID
had an impact on some of these close midterm races.
So the National Bureau of Economic Research has conducted a study titled
excess death rates for Republicans and Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And in it we learn that unfortunately,
there were far more Republican deaths than was necessary.
In fact, because of the misinformation regarding vaccines,
many Republican voters decided not to get vaccinated and
as a result, far more of them died compared to Democratic voters.
In 2018 according to the study and the early parts of 2020 Excess death rates for
Republicans and Democrats are similar and centered around zero.
Both groups experienced a similar large spike in excess deaths
in the winter of 2020 to 2021.
However, in the summer of 2021, after vaccines were widely available,
the Republican excess death rate rose to nearly double that of Democrats.
And this gap widened further in the winter of 2021.
So some person on Twitter tweeted to me to say, yeah, I mean,
maybe there are more Republicans that died because they didn't get vaccinated,
but pretty soon there's gonna be a lot more Democrat deaths
because of the vaccine, except no, that's not gonna happen.
And it actually pains me I don't feel good about the fact that there were people
in this country, our fellow Americans who were intentionally misled and
they died as a result of that.
It makes me sick to my stomach.
But let me continue with this study.
This gap widened further in 2021 according to the study's authors.
This rose to a 153% difference after
all adults could take the vaccine in Florida and Ohio.
And the gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated
in counties with low vaccination rates if that wasn't clear already.
Jason Schwartz, who's one of the authors of this study and
also teaches at, Yale says if Republicans are dying in increased
numbers relative to their Democratic colleagues in a political
climate where there are so many close electoral contests,
could that have been the decider in a particular race?
Our study can't answer that, but it certainly seems plausible given just how
stark the differences in vaccination rates have been among Democrats and Republicans.
So to be clear,
their study did not analyze how much of a difference this made in close races.
But I do wanna kinda turn to something that caught my attention.
So first there are some limitations to this study because of the data
available they mostly focused on Ohio and Florida.
Okay, so they in Ohio and
Florida might not be representative of all these other states.
So that's a limitation to the study that you should be aware of.
But nonetheless, I mean, when you think about it, let's go to Arizona, okay?
The gubernatorial race in Arizona between Republican Trump pick Kerry Lake and
the secretary of state and Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs Hobbs one,
but she didn't win by much.
Okay, so that's the outcome of that gubernatorial race in Arizona.
It's a difference of about 17,209 votes.
There's been a total of 31,613 COVID deaths in Arizona.
So could that have had an impact?
Maybe, I don't know for sure.
And obviously, not all of those deaths are attributed to Democratic voters or
Republican voters.
We don't know the breakdown in political identity.
We do know that more Republicans, unfortunately,
died because of the misinformation they were fed by vaccine deniers and such.
But I mean, could that have made a difference in Arizona maybe?
And maybe it's a bad idea to discourage your base to protect themselves
in the middle of a pandemic when you're gonna need their support.
And I don't know if Republican politicians namely, or
members of the media have really learned anything from that.
I mean and also the whole focus of this conversation is pretty crude and
terrible, right?
Because you shouldn't want anyone to needlessly die like [LAUGH] that
should be the number one driver and motivation for the Republican Party.
What can we do to protect as many people regardless of their
political affiliation, protect as many people as possible so
they don't have to die early so they can live long thriving lives.
No, but instead for some reason, they thought it would be
politically beneficial to share misinformation with their own voters and
supporters knowing full well they were lying about the vaccines and its efficacy,
and twice as many Republicans according to this study died compared to Democrats.
It's just incredible.
It really is incredible stuff.
So I'm sure there's gonna be even more analysis on this even more studies.
But a lot of these races were super close and honestly,
the number of COVID deaths could have made some difference.
Again, we don't know for sure but just something to keep in mind.