There are few things worth listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson on, but political takes on the midterms are definitely not one of them. There have been lots of theories as to why the midterm elections last week were disappointing to the GOP as the red wave failed to materialize, though it was finally announced on Tuesday night that Republicans have taken control of the House. Some thought the results amounted to supposed threats to democracy, which CNN's Dana Bash especially played up.
As for what deGrasse Tyson thinks did it, that would be COVID-19. Our friends at Twitchy highlighted how he tweeted out a blog post from Taegan Goddard's Political Wire that claimed, "Covid Deaths Probably Cost Republicans the Midterms."
Vaccine hesitancy, which was much higher among Republican voters than Democrats during COVID, led to disproportionate deaths among conservatives, and may have cost them the mid-term elections in close races. https://t.co/5IgOZcOaGr pic.twitter.com/AjMJDilvQu
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) November 15, 2022
So, if we're understanding this take correctly, Republicans couldn't vote because they were killed off by COVID-19. Morbid, much?
The blog post was three paragraphs long, quoting Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark, so you know you're going to get some kind of anti-GOP hot take. And Last certainly delivered, in a piece that was mostly about the likely 2024 primary battle between former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL).
As quoted by Goddard:
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Jonathan Last: “So again, lots of factors were at play. Including one that doesn’t get talked about much: excess Covid deaths. There’s been an ongoing study of the Republican resistance to the Covid vaccines and the preliminary findings suggest that post-vaccine, Republicans accounted for about 80 percent more of the excess deaths than Democrats. Part of this is because of vaccine hesitancy; part of it is because of the age profile of voters.”
“I’m not going to burden you with the math here, but if you want to read up on it, the data is quite striking, all the way to the county level.”
“To take just one example: between January 2021 and this month, 9,400 people in Nevada died of Covid. The data suggests that the majority of these people would have been Republican voters. Keep that number in mind.”
The links in question come from a NBER working paper and Pew Research Center. When it comes to that math that Last didn't want to "burden you with," an April 21 substack post from Matt Shapiro breaks it down. The post refers to the claim here as "the deeply mistaken conclusion that Covid is killing mainly Republicans."
Yes, this is exceptionally bad math. It is wish-casting claiming to be science
— PoliMath (@politicalmath) November 15, 2022
the fact that it is wish-casting around the death of the elderly just makes it that much uglierhttps://t.co/bOnJ7R9aAf
Referring to data from The New York Times, which had a similar way of going about things as Pew Research did, Shapiro has a word about breaking down people by counties:
We can see that this chart claims to be about politics but, when we see the details, might be more about an urban-rural divide.
Or perhaps this is about age. The Trump counties have 30% more elderly per capita than the Biden counties, so we would naturally expect older counties to have higher rates of death.
Or perhaps this is about income. If we look at just the “Biden counties”, we find that there is a strong correlation between high-income counties and lower Covid rates.
Shapiro shares further information about Biden counties as well:
With a little bit of context, we can see what is happening here: There are about two dozen high-population, high-income counties that vote heavily for Democrats. This group skews heavily to a few large metros, especially if we’re not including the counties of New York City. For a little bit of perspective of how regionally concentrated this group is, 20% of the “Biden counties” population lives in Los Angeles.
These high population counties tend to be populated with younger people and a higher concentration of workers able to work remotely. When they catch Covid, they have quick access to medical care. The low-income counties that vote heavily for Democrats are rural and poor and much more likely to die of Covid not because of their political alignment (which is identical to the high-income counties) but because of structural disadvantages.
These structural disadvantages don’t go away due to voting patterns. They persist across all rural and poor communities regardless of what hole they punched in a voting booth on November 3rd, 2020.
Shapiro mentions another point worth highlighting, and calling out anyone who would make such political takes, from the loons at the Bulwark, to deGrasse Tyson, and anyone else who would propagate such a take:
I cannot say how much I hate this framing, not because it is a manipulation of the data (though that component is certainly present in the omission of a myriad of essential details) but because it combines two intellectual practices I most loathe:
The practice of filtering all data patterns into “red vs blue” because that happens to be the data we have most readily available
The implication that COVID is a moral disease and the people who are dying are dying because they did the wrong things
This incessant red vs blue framing says, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that it’s mainly Republicans dying from COVID and that’s their fault.
Despite this substack post coming in April, earlier on Wednesday, Matthew Gault of VICE wrote that "Almost Twice as Many Republicans Died From COVID Before the Midterms Than Democrats," referring to the NBER study as well. He did go on to admit in the sub headline that the "authors of a new study can’t say if this impacted the midterms."
President Joe Biden, who has had COVID-19 despite being up to date on his vaccines, just received the latest booster last month. During his remarks beforehand, which again came weeks after that "60 Minutes" interview, he had the nerve to claim "as we enter this new moment in the battle against COVID, let’s use it to start fresh as a country, to put all the old battles over COVID behind us, to put all the partisan politics aside."
Perhaps he should have a word with deGrasse Tyson.
It's also worth looking into how much of an issue COVID was in the minds of voters based on the available exit poll data. Neither POLITICO nor Reuters mentioned COVID-19 or the pandemic in their pieces about exit polls. The same goes for CNN's multiple write-ups.
In the polls before the election, which we ought to take with a grain of salt given how much of a surprising miss the midterms were, COVID-19 consistently ranked toward the bottom, if not the bottom, of voters' concerns.
Further, as Madeline covered, a Gallup survey from last week found that Americans' worries with COVID were the lowest since June 2021.
An Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index, released shortly before the "60 Minutes" interview aired, highlighted how the number of Americans concerned with COVID was "among the lowest captured throughout the pandemic." Nearly two-thirds of respondents, 65 percent, said there is a small or no risk to returning to their normal, pre-COVID life. The 46 percent who said they had already returned to their normal, pre-COVID life was more "than at any point during the pandemic," the highlights also noted.
A Monmouth University poll released last month also showed that among the top 12 issues adults were asked to select as important priorities, "Covid pandemic" came in 11th place. Just 32 percent said it was "extremely" or "very important."
If the American people are as ready to move on, it goes without saying that it wasn't a factor in the midterms.
As disappointing as the midterm outcomes were, blowing past not just expectations but historic precedent when it comes to how the president's party performs, not even liberal hacks should be tempted to offer such a simple, hot take as to why the midterms went the way they did.
