A single graphic went viral claiming the most pro-Trump fifth of American counties suffered about 70,000 more COVID-19 deaths than the most pro-Biden fifth. It packs four different claims into one image. This assessment sorts them apart: one accurate number, one partially supported cause, one moral claim the data cannot settle, and one non sequitur.
The image works because it fuses a real statistic to a causal story, a moral verdict, and a conclusion about one official, then asks you to accept or reject all four at once. Trusting all of it and dismissing all of it are both wrong. The evidence behind each claim is different, and so is how far it reaches. Almost every source here is politically situated, including the peer-reviewed ones, so the discipline is to weight sources by design quality rather than by masthead.
Six of the assessment's findings. The full report has more.
Pew split US counties into five equal-population groups by 2020 margin. The most pro-Trump group had nearly 70,000 more COVID-19 deaths than the most pro-Biden group through February 28, 2022. These are raw counts, with no adjustment for age, income, or health-care access.
Linking Florida and Ohio voter files to 538,159 individual death records and adjusting for age, county, and state, researchers found excess death rates about 15 percent higher for registered Republicans. That is the finding that matters, because it is not a county-level artifact.
Before adults were vaccine-eligible, the adjusted partisan difference was slightly negative and crossed zero. After open eligibility it was positive 7.7 points, about 43 percent higher excess mortality. The gap is a vaccination-era phenomenon, not a masking-era one.
From 2001 to 2019 the age-adjusted all-cause mortality gap between Republican-voting and Democratic-voting counties widened from 16.7 to 107.1 deaths per 100,000, driven by heart disease, cancer, and chronic disease. Part of the gap predates the pandemic.
In a county model of the Delta and Omicron waves controlling for age, pre-pandemic mortality, poverty, education, race, insurance, and more, partisanship remained the largest single coefficient. That is the strongest evidence for the graphic.
Whether a partisan behavioral gap contributed to deaths and whether a specific official erred on school closures, distancing, or origins are different questions. Treating the mortality numbers as a verdict on one person is the graphic's actual error.
Read the full 19-page assessment for the rest, including where the strongest study's effect concentrates by state and why the claim that the vaccines failed is not supportable.
This isn't an opinion piece. Every sentence is labeled by what stands behind it: verified fact, vendor claim, third-party estimate, my assessment, hypothesis, or scenario. Sources are numbered and clickable, and weighted by design quality rather than by masthead. It's the same method behind every market assessment I write.
Nineteen pages, built from public sources with no client brief and no interviews. Read it in the browser or take the PDF.
Each report here answers a real question, directed and researched against public sources and evaluated against a stated assumption, then delivered as Word and PDF. If you're weighing a platform, sizing a category, or defending a number to a board, tell me the decision behind it and I'll tell you honestly whether a report is the right tool.
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