What if COVID Fatalities Could Vote?
Given that the Democratic Party is having millions of dead people vote anyway, this abstract question doesn’t seem all that hypothetical.
by Rich Herschlag
America is exceptional. Exceptional in its guns per capita and yearly deaths by firearms. Exceptional in its draconian limits on reproductive rights. Exceptional especially among First World nations in its low life expectancy, high rate of drug overdose deaths, low rate of dental care coverage, high rate of vehicular fatalities and minimal amount of paid vacation time. Exceptional in the venality of its highest court. But in no category is America more exceptional than its collective amnesia. I used to know the name for that but I forgot.
COVID and its handling by the 45th President of the United States falls squarely into the total blackout category of American brain farts. Here are a few choice quotes from Donald J. Trump from that golden era of not so long ago:
“We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” (Feb. 2, 2020)
“I think the virus is going to be—it’s going to be fine. (Feb. 10, 2020)
“Looks like by April, you know in theory when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” (Feb. 10, 2020)
“We’re going very substantially down, not up.” (Feb. 24, 2020)
“No, I’m not concerned at all.” (March 7, 2020)
“Just stay calm. It will go away.” (March 10, 2020)
“The faster we go back, the better it’s going to be.” (March 25, 2020)
“This is going to go away without a vaccine.” (May 9, 2020)
For a full dose of Trump 2020 COVID inanities, please see U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett’s website. By the time you’re done reading through it the next pandemic will have begun.
As various powerful American constituencies—women, Blacks, Latinos, folks with a college education—suffer severe, exceptional memory lapses and lean MAGA in poll after poll, the thought struck me: What if COVID fatalities could vote? Given that the Democratic Party is having millions of dead people vote anyway, this abstract question doesn’t seem all that hypothetical.
Presumably, in their post-COVID afterlife, these folks—having learned the hard way about the danger of listening to a disingenuous, duplicitous, self-serving Commander-in-chief—would lean blue in the coming election were they to suddenly reincarnate. To answer the question with some degree of accuracy, analytics would utilize CDC statistics on COVID deaths state by state along with the electoral college maps from the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. For simplicity it is assumed, people would mail in ballots to the same state from which they exited this mortal coil.
One’s first Rorschach-ish impression upon studying the CDC maps is how closely the states with the highest COVID death rates mirror the red state block that will quite possibly and soon put a shackled Trump back in the White House. Death rates per 100,000 were among the highest in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Kentucky. You may have to remind yourself, once again, these are the CDC maps from 2020-1, not a map of states and territories seceding during the American Civil War. Throw in Ohio, West Virginia, and Wyoming and you have around three quarters of the modern red states.
The fatalities state by state are meaningful and informative when it comes to the demographics of American COVID morbidity. For instance, the 2021 Alabama death rate was 152.8 per 100,000, translating to a total of 9,401 deaths; as compared to, say, the death rate of 61.5 per 100,000 (5,451 total) in the state of Oregon. Oklahoma in 2021 had a whopping death rate of 158.8 per 100,000 (7,279 total), while in 2020 Mississippi had a respectably depressing rate of 123.5 (4,466 total).
While these figures in hard red states—even if tripled to approximate close surviving family members carrying around the kind of political vendetta only a sound memory could trigger—are not sufficient by themselves to overcome the red-blue vote gap in the forthcoming election, what about the battleground states? Pennsylvania’s 2020 rate of 88.1 resulted in 16,609 deaths. Trump won the state in 2016 by a margin of 44,292. Applying the triple rule to the COVID deaths in 2020 alone (there were another 18,169 in 2021) gives us a total of 49,827 bonus blue voters—enough to potentially swing the state in 2024.
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Michigan’s 2020 rate of 85.9 came to 11,391 deaths. Trump won the state in 2016 by a margin of 22,748. Tripling the deaths in 2020 (there were another 13,637 in 2021), yields a relatively comfortable Biden victory in 2024. Arizona’s 2020 rate of 87.6 amounted to 8,447 deaths. Trump’s Arizona margin of victory in 2016 was a relatively beefy 211,141. But Arizona lost another 12,706 citizens to COVID in 2021, and Biden’s margin of victory in the state in 2020—presumably among living voters unless you ask Kari Lake—was 10,457. In other words, the prospect of resurrected COVID fatalities and vendettas of their pissed off families could mean a substantially larger margin of victory for Biden in Arizona this year.
Of course, this sort of wishful thinking falls well within the confines of fairy tales, not so much because of the resurrection part (Between legitimate NDE research and the prospect of extending life indefinitely using AI, science is bringing us closer to the afterlife every day), but because American amnesia—among both the living and the dead—is exceeded perhaps only by American addiction to sports betting sites. Last weekend I listened in agony as some random network newscaster said Americans miss the soaring Dow of the Trump years. Earth to brain dead talking head—the Dow hit an all time high this past week.
This same hollow-headed contingent of registered voters—consisting of no more than 100 million or so cases of very, very early onset dementia—remembers unemployment in the Trump years as being much lower than the all-time record lows of today. And the 2020 COVID-driven unemployment rate of about 15 percent exists only in a black hole of human recollection. It seems with Americans, especially red-blooded American males, only the most meaningless, visceral experiences are recalled with any accuracy whatsoever. So if some dude got a really nice lap dance sometime during 2019 you can bet he’s voting Trump in 2024.
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COVIDfefe.
I have often wondered given the tightness of the votes in the key states and the fact old people lean heavily Republican if Donald Trumps fatally terrible response to the pandemic saw him kill his potential margin of victory in 2020