Mortality and impacts seem to hit people over 50 the hardest, and that is where a majority of the Republican supporters come from.
It would be a curious footnote to have COVID-19 swing an election.
Source: https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/economic-demogra...
- old people vote in far larger proportion compared to young folks
- they tend to vote conservative
- this virus is likely to kill old people disproportionately
- red states tend to do less well in terms of all kinds of infrastructure, including medical
...then would you expect to see a change in the results of future elections?
The first thing that I would draw your attention to is that social shifts have moved the "silent generation" from being evenly split Democrat/Republican in 2004 to going for Trump by a 13 point margin in 2016. This is the group that will suffer the vast majority of fatalities. See https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-... for verification.
Secondly, women lean Democratic, men Republican. (The same link verifies that.) Most casualties will be men. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... for verification.
Third, the upcoming generations through that 12 years are overwhelmingly Democratic and will have almost no deaths from this disease. Both previous links verify that.
The result is that, a well researched article from a dozen years ago notwithstanding, the impact of COVID-19 are likely to disproportionately hit Republicans over Democrats.
(Not necessarily. The one trend that Republicans can hope for is that diseases spread through urban areas and urban areas are overwhelmingly Democratic. I don't think that this offsets the other phenomena though.)
Something like a stroke requires immediate action (say, within 2 hours) to be able to use the best treatments available. Living very far away from a good hospital makes your survival chances quite lower.
For Covid-19, as far as I read, some people have gone to the hospital (already having trouble to breath) and died after a few hours. But those seem extreme cases. Normally you would have a couple days to go to the hospital from the moment you realize something is odd.
Then there is the issue of cost for that flight and the poor state of healthcare.
I live (urban/suburban) in spitting distance of 3-4+ hospitals (I don't even know for sure) with at least 2 of those being ones I would trust my life to in a heartbeat (the others I just don't know enough about). I was really unaware of the disconnect before that trip and it didn't really occur to me that hospital != hospital. So not only do some rural location have limited or no hospitals but they don't trust the ones they do have.
The current White House is essentially the worst case scenario in dealing with this outbreak and is going to get people killed. There is still current exponential growth in the USA, and there is near zero testing going on due to incompetence and coverup. Things are going to get much worse.
Downvote all you want, but these are facts.
The main issue right now is the lack of testing and covering up just to try and bump the stock market, and it obviously is having the opposite effect since the problem is just getting worse the longer the problem is ignored.
Everyone will come in contact with the virus. People under 50 years old (as recent reports have stated) have a high chance of survival. The deaths from it will mostly be from those 50 years and old. Voters who are 50 years and older largely vote for the Republican party.
My mom drives 90 minutes a day to be with my dad in nursing home rehabilitation, the closest facility. The normal response time for an ambulance is 20 minutes, plus 30-45m to an ER. Their doctors are a similar distance. Note that the ambulance is volunteer, and the average member is 55. They live in NY, in a county with a decent sized city. It’s worse in the real boonies.
I live in a city, a paramedic will be at your door in 7-10m. Hospital 5-10m, etc.
If this gets bad, everyone will be familiar with tragedy. The urban stories will be about neglected patients in overcrowded wards and people who die of untreated strokes, etc. The rural tragedies will be finding grandma, drowned in her own phlegm because sick relatives and travel restrictions isolated her from support.
I'm pretty sure I'd rather be homesteading off-grid in a remote wilderness or on a sailboat than in an average American suburb through all this.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-po...
Irony.
"Initially the left was saying flu was a bigger threat. Now they are taking it seriously, shutting down events.
Initially the right was taking it seriously, banning travel. Now they are calling it the flu."
That's not really what GP's poll indicates:
> About four of every 10 Democrats said they thought the new coronavirus poses an imminent threat, compared to about two of every 10 Republicans.
Both less than half.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/fact-checking-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/politics/coronavirus-t...
Parliament has sat today, without her, so it's still quite possible that others will catch it.
Beyond direct consequences, it seems reasonable that covid19 would affect the election by tanking the economy and giving Trump nothing to point at as his big accomplishments
I myself am not worried, but I AM worried about my Fox News watching elderly parents. They are in danger the most. Also, mis-informed.
This is how years of denial, spin, propaganda, lying, and gaslighting end up being. In fact - deadly.
This is really not the time for petty partisan politics. Both parties are propaganda machines. It is the nature of the two party system.
>https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/chuck_schumer_q...
I think the fact that it's an election year, more people are susceptible to thinking the pandemic is overblown and thus a conspiracy to defeat Trump.
Perhaps it's just that they can change course without any pushback from their demographic -- they're happy believing that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Still, it must cost them something to be quite so demonstrably wrong on something that's so much in people's faces. (As opposed to, say, climate change, where the effects are much slower and more easily shuffled under "the heat wave and fires are just weather".)
Personally I'm not sure if it will outweigh how democrats are more likely to live in denser urban areas where spread is faster.
ruth bader ginsburg is 86 years old, and still seems sharp as a tack.
That's highly subjective and no doubt any assessment is likely to strongly align with partisanship.
Which is why we need age limits. You can't expect people to objectively evaluate whether those inside or outside their party are still legislating or judging effectively in their 80s. Obviously most Republicans would lean towards arguing that she's senile and most Democrats would lean toward the opposite.
And then I imagine cognitive decline does not affect all faculties equally - so someone may still, say, have no trouble writing essays, but their judgement may be compromised.