Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democratleaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views. This study constructs an individual-level dataset with political affiliation and excess death rates during the COVID-19 pandemic via a linkage of 2017 voter registration in Ohio and Florida to mortality data from 2018 to 2021. We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Postvaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.

Application of Elastic Net Regression for Modeling COVID-19 Sociodemographic Risk Factors

“…Democratic voting percentage had highly significant negative correlations with cases across both pandemic time periods. This is supported by previous studies which cite a county-level partisan correlation (as determined by voting percentage) with respect to COVID-19 distancing (Roberts and Utych 2021), cases (Gollwitzer et al 2020), and deaths (Wallace, Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Schwartz 2022). Additionally, these findings complement previous research which cites a partisan divide with respect to trust in pandemic information resources and the effect it had on COVID-19 attack (Latkin et al 2020).…”

Mortality Effects of Healthcare Supply Shocks: Evidence Using Linked Deaths and Electronic Health Records

“…The mortality record linkage worked well in our study, and it is potentially useful for other research databases such as on employment, education, housing, pensions, and clinical trials. Very recently, these data have been linked to voter registration records to examine excess mortality by political party affiliation (Wallace et al, 2022).…”

Incentivizing COVID-19 vaccination among racial/ethnic minority adults in the United States: $209 per dose could convince the hesitant

“…Survey data for this study were ascertained prior to the emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variant in the United States and before most adult populations were eligible to receive a vaccine booster dose of an mRNA or Janssen COVID-19 vaccine [41,42]. It is possible that survey respondents would have been willing to accept lower incentive amounts during periods of peak COVID-transmission or immediately following emergency use authorization of boosters when there may have been a greater "demand" for vaccination.…”