Better, IMO: (1) those who believe in science would panic less. (2) And for those who don't, they would not be impacted since they are YOLO. (3) And for science + non-science interactions, that would be less stressful since we are all pretty much used to putting up with each other in this way.
Citation needed, but of course you can’t provide those numbers. Did the republicans also have higher birth rates, and managed to grow a new batch in time to win the 2024 election?
In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.
Perhaps related is that the voting age population (vap) only increased ~30% of what would be predicted by the curve fit up to that point. Could be that some people died out of the vap early.
Compounded with that, the voting eligible population (vep) increased exactly as predicted. Which means for each early demose of someone in the vap, someone else already in the vap became eligible when they hadn't been previously. Perhaps some states changed their laws about who was eligible?
This statement is not true, the 2020 election had both a higher absolute total turnout and a higher number of absolute votes for the winning candidate.
Regardless, the cleaner way to compare election years is by % VEP or %VAP - otherwise you're effectively comparing population between the years by accident. From this perspective I disagree with GP, 2024 was still a great year for turnout... just not as good as 2020. 2024 sits 2nd in VEP and 7th VAP (out of the last 24 elections).
> more votes than anyone had ever received prior to that.
That fact falls into a whole class of "new records" which sound impressive but are usually meaningless, because it's closer to the default outcome.
In this case, the voting-age population was (yet again) going to increase, so each "new record" in votes cast becomes boringly-normal rather than unusually interesting. The same also happens with certain dollar-amount records, which are not adjusted for inflation or overall economy growth.
A similar phenomenon to https://xkcd.com/1138/ , except it has to do with trends over time rather than geographically.
While it’s true that setting a new record isn’t unusual, in the case of 2020, the turnout was actually very high even taking into account population growth.
Better, IMO: (1) those who believe in science would panic less. (2) And for those who don't, they would not be impacted since they are YOLO. (3) And for science + non-science interactions, that would be less stressful since we are all pretty much used to putting up with each other in this way.