Given that Covid-19 has become intensely politicized, I started wondering – will the Death patterns seen to date have an impact on elections in 2022 and beyond? On the one hand, we’ve heard that minorities are dying at higher rates, whether due to poorer medical treatment or more exposure to the virus (a lower rate of work-from-home). On the other hand, the number one factor in terms of COVID mortality risk (other than vaccination status) is age – and the older you go in the US population pyramid, the whiter the demographics become.

I decided to try cross-referencing two data sources in Georgia to see how COVID might have changed the electorate. Given that President Biden won GA by only 12,000 votes, here, even small shifts in the electorate could have meaningful results. The Georgia Department of Public Health breaks Covid Deaths down by age and race, and 2020 exit polling data provides a (rough) guide to how different demographics voted.

We can do some simple math to gauge the impacts, weighting the deaths by Biden/Trump voting split to determine the total impact on the Red/Blue dynamic. Here is 2020 exit polling data by age and race from CNN – since black and white were the only racial categories measured, we’ll focus on these (the number of COVID deaths in other groups in GA is dwarfed by these two groups).

From the Georgia Dept. of Public Health, here are COVID deaths by race:

In absolute terms, the number of white deaths greatly exceeds all other groups, principally because the vast majority of Georgians (and Americans) over 70 are white.

Now let’s do the math. We’ll use a simple model – we’re just using the age groups by race, and the voting margins by age and race, to determine how many votes each side has likely lost due to death by COVID. COVID has resulted in substantial excess mortality in the US since March 2020, so most of these people would still be alive and voting. Here’s the spreadsheet.

Results:

GOP candidates are likely to lose 4,661 votes due to COVID deaths.

Democratic candidates are likely to lose 4,895 votes due to COVID deaths.

This leads to a swing of 234 votes in the GOP’s favor. This result is influenced by a few factors:

• While white deaths do substantially exceed black deaths in total, the black population of Georgia is experiencing substantial excess mortality – total deaths of black Georgians exceed that of white Georgians for ages 18-49, despite being roughly 1/3 of the population in that age group.
• Biden won Georgia by chipping away at Trump’s margin among white voters – while older black voters favored Biden 94-6, older white voters favored Trump by 72-28. Since COVID mortality is centered on the elderly, the lopsided voting patterns help cushion the GOP’s losses.

My prior assumption, when glancing at the Georgia Dept of Public Health graphs, was that COVID might have a non-trivial impact on GOP support, simply given the large number of deaths among older white voters. This analysis has ignored differential vaccination rates by political leaning – so it’s possible that going forward, this calculus might change, since conservatives appear most vaccine resistant. In Georgia at least, it appears that COVID deaths are not leading to much net change in the electorate. States with a more homogeneous white population might experience a more profound impact, since age would then be the only important variable.