James Surowiecki Profile picture
Oct 3, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
New study of almost 600,000 deaths in Ohio and Florida shows that registered Republicans had far higher excess-death rates than registered Democrats during the pandemic, with almost all of the gap coming after vaccines were available.
nber.org/system/files/w…
@_Kodos_ @politicalmath Vaccination rates for the elderly in American red states were much lower than vax rates in the UK - 10-15 points lower. So the unvaxxed elderly, and unvaxxed <65, accounted for a much higher percentage of total deaths here.
@AmyBeePhoenix @_Kodos_ @politicalmath The county data is suggestive of what's obviously true, namely that differences in vax rates explain the widening of the excess-death gap in 2021. But it's the documentation of the fact that that gap was small in 2020, and widened dramatically post-vax, that is most important.
@SwedenTeam Anyway, the data on vax rates by race aren't reliable enough to make fine-grained distinctions. What we know is that black and white vax rates are in the same ballpark, Latino rates are higher, and Asian vax rates are very high.
@ZetaReticulon @OxfordJo70 The 2nd and 3rd waves in Northeastern states with high vax rates, for instance, were much lower than the 1st wave. That obviously would not have happened had the vaccines been killing people.
@EduEngineer "We do not observe a statistically significant association between the county-level vaccination rate and the Republican-Democrat excess death gap until after the vaccine is widely available."
@EduEngineer It's only after the vaccines become available that Republicans start dying in far greater numbers than Democrats. And again, these are excess deaths, not just raw Covid deaths, so the study is already controlling, to some degree, for health/wealth effects in death rates.

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More from @JamesSurowiecki

Aug 13, 2023
If you want to know why Republican primary voters keep nominating guaranteed losers like Doug Mastriano and Don Bolduc in potentially winnable races, it's in part because they think their crazy views are shared by a large majority of Americans. Image
If Republican base voters had an even vaguely accurate view of public opinion, they would never have nominated so many hard-right MAGA candidates in winnable swing-state races in 2022. But they have an incredibly inaccurate view of public opinion.
As I've argued many times, the fundamental problem for the Republican Party is not the Republican establishment: it's the Republican base.
surowiecki.medium.com/the-republican…
Read 4 tweets
Aug 10, 2023
1. One thing that's crucial to remember about Trump's attempt to pressure Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" is when that call happened. It did not happen, as many ppl seem to think, while Georgia was still counting or even re-counting votes.
alternet.org/more-than-a-do…
2. Instead, Trump's call to Raffensperger (during which he threatened him with criminal prosecution) happened on January 2. At that point, Georgia had already re-counted and hand-recounted all its votes, certified the election results, and its electoral votes had been cast.
3. There was, then, no vote-counting going on. There were no re-counts or audits left to do. The state had certified the election, and the electors had voted, in accordance with Georgia law and the Constitution. The election was done.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 25, 2023
Pro-appeasement politicians are scrambling to salvage their position, so they've decided to lie about what ppl were saying about Prigozhin. Exactly no one was calling him "a liberal reformer."
Other than maybe Ted Cruz, JD Vance is the most cynical demagogue in American politics.
@mwarden49 MTG is nuts. Hawley's a contender.
Read 11 tweets
May 24, 2023
I will never understand why DeSantis didn't hold a big kickoff rally in a Florida football stadium. It would have been covered live by cable news, and would have sent the message, "I'm a normal guy who likes the same things you do," which is a message DeSantis needs to send.
Instead, he launches his campaign in the lost online way possible, risking the kind of glitchiness he ran into, and ensuring the TV coverage of the event would be minimal, since television networks like events with images.
Read 4 tweets
May 23, 2023
Reading "Trust the Plan," Will Sommer's book about QAnon. It makes clear how absurd it is to argue that YouTube, Twitter, etc. should be obliged to publish the kind of conspiratorial, defamatory, harassing content (often aimed at non-famous ppl) that Q supporters specialized in.
American law is ill-equipped to deal adequately with online defamation and conspiracy nonsense targeting individuals. The notion that on top of this, social-media platforms should be required to publish this kind of content is absolutely bonkers.
The other thing the book makes clear is how completely feckless and cowardly Republican politicians have been when it comes to Q.

Instead of making it clear to their voters it was an absurd, offensive conspiracy theory that had no connection to reality, almost all stayed quiet.
Read 4 tweets
May 23, 2023
This is just objectively false. It has absolutely not been proven that work requirements lift people out of poverty. In fact, the best studies show work requirements do not increase labor-force participation. Their real impact is to throw eligible ppl off SNAP and Medicaid.
Work requirements sound appealing to lots of people. But here's my recent piece for The Atlantic on why they don't work the way Kevin McCarthy says they do.
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
The idea that there are lots of able-bodies ppl out there who aren't working who would start working if you threaten to take away $135 a month in food stamps is on the face of it absurd. What work requirements mostly do is create a lot of pointless paperwork.
Read 4 tweets

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