Doctors and demographers recently noticed another tragic example of how polarization shapes America: The pandemic has killed more people in the nation’s Republican enclaves than its Democratic strongholds. They explain the gap by pointing to Republican resistance to vaccines and the GOP’s more cavalier approach to combating the virus in general.
Those findings suggest many more Republicans — tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands — have died of COVID-19 than Democrats, leading some to wonder with some morbidity what the political impact will be. Will Democrats, facing the normal midterm election headwinds plus high inflation, do surprisingly well in 2022 for the simple, sad fact that there are fewer Republicans?
Or, to put it another way: Can we expect this partisan mortality shift to show up in the polling data?
