The grim reality of a partisan pandemic

What we can’t know, though, is who is dying. We know broad demographic categories — age, race — but nothing specific about those who’ve perished after contracting the virus. If we were to assume that the partisan split among those who died in each of the groups aligns with the county groups overall, just over half of those who died nationally since Election Day would have been Republican. That’s probably not a fair assumption, given the correlation between more-Republican places with higher rates of death and lower rates of vaccination. But, again, we have only so much data.