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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

1% decrease doesn't diminish their size and political influence substantially, even of the disproportionate elderly population. Then only a fraction of the remainders that lose a loved one would re-evaluate, a large fraction of them would still be bounced back when they realize the other ideas "your group" inherits is even harder to accept as a personality trait. Most of them will inherit just enough to not think further about the matter.

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It's 1% of the whole population, but a much larger percentage of certain political ideologies.

well, sure yeah.

far left spiritualists and naturopaths are a tiny population, far right people occupy sparsely populated areas.

funny application of horseshoe theory.

Elections swing on fairly small margins. Also, the older folks are more likely to vote than young ones, so the fact that the virus is more deadly to the elderly increases the effect.

IIRC some swing states were decided by less than 1%?

That would be Arizona (0.31%), Georgia (0.24%), and Wisconsin (0.63%), with 37 electoral votes collectively. The total margin in all those states combined was only about 42k votes.

If Trump had won all of those instead, there would have been an electoral college tie, which would have resulted in the House deciding on a one-vote-per-state basis. It wouldn't have been pretty.

Biden also won Pennsylvania, with its 20 electoral votes, by 1.16%.

There was an interesting situation in New York. After the 2020 census, they lost a seat in Congress because their population size shrunk proportional to the rest of the country's. If New York had just avoided 2 or 3 of the larger nursing home COVID outbreaks, they'd have kept the seat.

Very roughly, there's a House seat per 750,000 people in the US. They were really close enough that a couple nursing home populations (in the hundreds) made the difference?

Yes, by 89 people. Incredible.

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