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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   18873 thread views

USA Election Day 2022 Megathread

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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Did the GOP hurt their own election chances by downplaying COVID?

This tweet claims that Lauren Boebert may lose her race by less than 100 votes, in a district with over 2,500 covid deaths. While one can certainly argue over the effectiveness of various measures, I think a combination of masking, distancing, and (of course) vaccinating could easily be worth plus or minus 8% deaths (the vote is roughly evenly split, so if there would otherwise be about 1250 dead from each group, then we have 100/1250 = about 8%). And the elderly, who were disproportionately affected by COVID, tend to vote Republican.

Note, the original tweet is now out of date; https://elections.denverpost.com/ has Boebert ahead by just over 1,000 votes. The closest House race where the Dem is currently ahead, coincidentally also in CO, unfortunately does not appear in https://geographicinsights.iq.harvard.edu/coviduscongress because it's a new district (CO 8). CA District 13 is also very close, with the Republican ahead by 267 (according to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/10/us/elections/results-house-seats-elections-congress.html, at time of writing) in a district with 945 covid deaths. If this race does flip, it could easily be by just a few hundred votes (currently only 58% counted though).

Another question: did they hurt their election chances by overplaying the trans issue?

Sure, I don't have anything to go for this one expect one tweet by an obviously hostile source, but still, it seems like an issue where a lot of normies are just going to be befuzzled by why this sort of a thing would even be worth an ad, or two.

FWIW, I don't think I saw a single mention of the topic in the Fetterman/Oz ad festival, or in any of Shapiros ads (I don't think Mastriano ever ran any at all).

I don't see how. Castrating children isn't that popular of a position (yet), so that why republicans mention it, and why democrats avoid it by sweeping under the "healthcare" umbrella.

I thought you were going to say the Republicans hurt their chances because the "correct" take was to lean in hard to Covid panic and authoritarianism.

Had Trump gone all-in on Covid, the battle lines would have drawn up differently. Democrats, not Republicans, would be Covid skeptics. Early in the pandemic this was indeed the case, with the various cringey "hug an Asian" messaging being sent out by the Democrats. But then Trump chose his side, and the Democrats by necessity chose the other.

This was by far the largest mistake of Trump's career. Had he chosen Covid maximalism, he'd still be President. People still wouldn't like him - but they'd praise his Covid leadership. Most people were very panicked about Covid until early 2022. And even though this fear was largely unfounded, the politically savvy move would have been to play into the fear. Trump failed to read the room. And he lost the Presidency because of it.

Early in the pandemic this was indeed the case, with the various cringey "hug an Asian" messaging being sent out by the Democrats.

I don't remember this at all in my neck of the woods (surrounded by extreme leftists). Yes, leftists were afraid that COVID would inflame anti Asian hatred, but they also thought COVID was going to be a complete disaster early on. I just remember everyone already coming to the forgone conclusion that Trump had mishandled everything by not taking COVID seriously enough, as early as mid March 2020, and that we all need to lock down everything and that COVID was essentially the apocalypse.

Most people were very panicked about Covid until early 2022.

Were they? My recollection of summer of 2021 was that most people believed that the vaccines were effective.

No. I don't think either the hard-line liberal or conservative stances on Covid were correct, and the politicization of the topic very likely cost us a great deal of lives and money and freedom.

I have no idea what would have happened if he had embraced the original battle lines on covid, but I think he wouldn't be president any way. He was never that popular if you look at 2016 election results, and I think regardless of policy covid would have had negative economic effects that would hurt him because that's how people vote. That's just my opinion, though, I don't claim much certainty.

You need to go back to being a moron. I wouldn’t vote for a take COVID seriously person and this seems like a troll posts.

  • -10

This is uncalled for. Do not be antagonistic like this.

What's with the aggressive response? Agree or disagree, I don't see any reason to fling heated insults like that. Chill.

Most people were very panicked about Covid until early 2022. And even though this fear was largely unfounded

This is due to the media hyping it up. If Trump had been a Covid maximalist, the media would've been on the other side.

This was a trollish take back in the spring of 2020 when twitter blue-checks were suggesting with barely concealed glee that Republican's refusal to mask up, cancel grandma's funeral, bend the knee to saint Fauci, etc... was going to result in mass deaths and the depopulation of the red states.

It's an even more trollish take now, given what we no about Covid-19's lethality (or rather relative lack there of), and the long term damage done by the lockdowns.

A lot of people might have been gleeful. I was not one of them; I'm asking a serious question because it seems like, potentially, a pretty big own goal to encourage your constituents to do things that are fairly risky. If a lot of people ended up with felony convictions because the Dems encouraged them to riot, for example, that would also be a pretty big own goal.

given what we no about Covid-19's lethality (or rather relative lack there of), and the long term damage done by the lockdowns.

I'm not really sure how either of these points are supposed to be relevant. For races that aren't very close it obviously doesn't matter, but it isn't hard to look up actual COVID deaths by congressional district and compare it to the margin. Saying "the lethality is low!" is completely irrelevant. And you can oppose lockdowns without telling people COVID is just the flu (which isn't even a nontrivial risk for the elderly).

Define "risky"

My point is that given that covid-19 turned out to be orders of magnitude less lethal than was initially claimed you're going to put in some work if your going to argue the GOP lost more votes to Covid deaths than it would have had it supported strict lockdowns mail in voting etc...

Orders of magnitude? Do you have anything resembling a citation for that? I saw initial estimate of maybe 1% IFR, decreasing down to a few tenths of a percent as the most vulnerable died/treatment improved. This paper from May claims anywhere from 0.5-2.5%. For covid to be "orders of magnitude less risky" than originally claimed would make it among the least-deadly viruses ever known.

you're going to put in some work if your going to argue the GOP lost more votes to Covid deaths

There's some math in the original post, did you not bother to read it?

than it would have had it supported strict lockdowns mail in voting etc...

Or, you know, not gone crazy shouting that covid was just the flu and getting sick just to own the libs.

Orders of magnitude? Do you have anything resembling a citation for that? I saw initial estimate of maybe 1% IFR, decreasing down to a few tenths of a percent

One percent getting cut to a tenth of a percent is an order of magnitude and that was before we found out that rates of infection may have actually been much higher than previously thought making the disease that much less lethal.

If that article is correct, with about 6.6M deaths and world population of 8 billion, then the IFR is still over 0.1%, within 1 order of magnitude of the original estimates.

A naive rate calculation 6.6 million deaths in a population of 7.8 billion yields an IFR of 0.084%, and that's assuming that 100% of those 6.6 million deaths were actually caused by covid and not "died by other causes while infected with covid". Meanwhile at the height of the lockdown hysteria government officials were speculating that the IFR might be as high as 3%, but that was quietly memory-holed when it came out that that particular estimate was based solely on data from the state of New York where some bright spark had decided that the best place to house patients with a respiratory disease would be in public nursing homes.

Accordingly I stand by my initial statement.

A naive rate calculation 6.6 million deaths in a population of 7.8 billion yields an IFR of 0.084%

That's not an IFR. Your source claimed about 60% of the world may have been infected, so the IFR would be 6.6 million / (7.8*0.6) = 0.14%.

that's assuming that 100% of those 6.6 million deaths were actually caused by covid and not "died by other causes while infected with covid".

It's also assuming that there weren't deaths caused by covid which were missed. This blog post, which I thought was posted here or on the subreddit at some point, finds that total excess deaths usually substantially exceed official COVID deaths, although there's no way to know if that's because of missed COVID deaths or because of other factors, such as the spike in traffic fatalities in the US. (Unfortunately the post itself skips this point and just calls the difference a "fudge factor.")

You have compared the absolute highest IFR I've seen for Covid (actually I'm not sure I've ever seen 3% claimed; this paper gives estimates of over 5%, but that's for the case fatality rate, and so is much higher where there are more uncaught cases; the lower end 0.15%, almost identical to the 0.14% I gave above, is probably closer to the IFR, but I can't find any similar papers attempting to calculate IFR directly with early data), which also was not the "initial" estimate since NY didn't have a big wave until at least 6 months after it started in China and which you also seem to agree was an anomaly that was retracted, and comparing to an IFR that is substantially lower than even what your own source would support. Even with the absolute highest gap one can possibly construct, misleadingly so in fact, you can only muster log_10(35) = 1.54 orders of magnitude, and even that includes real changes to the IFR over time (improved treatment, most vulnerable people dying first--according to this paper, IFR might have dropped by around 1/3 in the last 9 months of 2020).

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.

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... 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.

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.

Let's assume this is true - I can absolutely, without a doubt, unequivocally tell you that I would refuse to vote for anyone that has Takes Covid Seriously as a brand. I'm far from alone among people who voted Republican in 2022. If Covid did kill a bunch of Republicans, it may still have been more electorally costly to piss off the people that are voting for you precisely because you aren't a mask enthusiast.

Personally, I would do my best to avoid any voting for candidates that have either "takes covid seriously" or "covid is a nothingburger" as a brand. I think you can easily strike a balance between "extreme lockdowns are stupid and tyrannical" and "yeah you should get the vaccine and not do dangerous things."

Pray tell what are dangerous things? Please articulate what you mean as opposed to hint at what you mean.

Like, going to large superspreader events before vaccines are available? What's the confusion, are you just pretending not to know how covid spreads?

Getting covid means having a bad cold for a very, very large fraction of the public, it also grants some immunity to that strain and perhaps others.

To most people, that isn’t dangerous. I think your concept of risk is off quite a bit.

Pre-vaccine, for someone around 55, which is probably the age of many GOP voters, getting COVID gives 50% higher risk of death than your yearly average risk. By 65 it appears to be several times your yearly risk, and for comparison, about 10 times the per-jump death risk of BASE jumping. Certainly something you can decide to do, but doesn't sound like something that you want to encourage your voting base to do if your race is close.

That makes it sound high. But what is the average risk of death? Also what is the increased risk of death of sitting around doing nothing?

Finally what superspreader events were rural Coloradans doing?

  • But what is the average risk of death? Also what is the increased risk of death of sitting around doing nothing?

Are these rhetorical questions, or did you assert that covid "isn't dangerous" without knowing any relevant data?

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