Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
Given that Sweden has the lowest post-2020 excess mortality of any OECD country, the Republicans might have a (very slight) advantage in the long term due to fewer lockdowns. Naturally, the death rates of Republicans are going to look worse than Democrats in general due to higher age, more obesity, and other cultural factors. But I really doubt Covid lockdown policy in red states made much of a dent, and may have actually increased the number of living Republicans as opposed to the counterfactual.
The bit about Covid being "just the flu" is not something that most Republicans supported. Trump famously encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated and even urged earlier adoption of the vaccines than the FDA was willing to grant him.
The bigger differences between the parties had to do with masking policy and lockdown policy, and I think you'd be hard pressed to show that these affected mortality rates in the direction you think they do.
A few states like California and Florida got lots of attention, but I seem to recall that mid-pandemic, there wasn't actually a very big correlation between state party control and covid policies.
I didn't say that GOP state politics had a big impact. I said (or at least, tried to say) that individual behavior, which is much more tightly correlated with individual political beliefs and voting, had an effect. Not a large one, but maybe similar in size to the vote difference in some races.
Trump personally encouraged vaccines, and he got booed for it. This isn't his fault (as far as I can tell), and I didn't say it was Trump's fault; but the correlation is clearly there and my hypothesis is that tweets like this contributed to some of those 2,500 deaths in her district.
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