It's not the average that's important, it is the percentage above 70 and 80 years that is the important factor.

That article is from 2008. A lot has changed since.

The first thing that I would draw your attention to is that social shifts have moved the "silent generation" from being evenly split Democrat/Republican in 2004 to going for Trump by a 13 point margin in 2016. This is the group that will suffer the vast majority of fatalities. See https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-... for verification.

Secondly, women lean Democratic, men Republican. (The same link verifies that.) Most casualties will be men. See https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... for verification.

Third, the upcoming generations through that 12 years are overwhelmingly Democratic and will have almost no deaths from this disease. Both previous links verify that.

The result is that, a well researched article from a dozen years ago notwithstanding, the impact of COVID-19 are likely to disproportionately hit Republicans over Democrats.

(Not necessarily. The one trend that Republicans can hope for is that diseases spread through urban areas and urban areas are overwhelmingly Democratic. I don't think that this offsets the other phenomena though.)

Cities skew democrat, particularly inner-cities. Those built-up areas are also more vulnerable to the spread of disease.

That's unclear, actually. The biggest single US cluster so far is in a retirement community in suburban Seattle. No one is safe here, novel viruses like this simply transmit too easily.

> Where democrats have been cancelling travel and buying toilet paper, republicans didn't even believe the crisis was real until the market crashed.

Don’t spread partisan bullshit.

There's literally a poll elsewhere in this thread showing exactly this kind of effect.

I mean, fine, it's a partisan point. But... I mean, seriously: at what point does it become OK to point out that Fox News and the Republican leadership[1] just plain fucked up the response to COVID-19 really badly? And that they seemingly did so out of a combination of both ignorance and partisan desire to minimize the problem?

Is that not OK? Because it's a real point, and one that needs to be made (and heard by republican voters), even if it's "partisan".

[1] And specifically Fox News and the Republican leaders, and not the "MSM" or Democratic leadership, who were saying opposite things and in hindsight were clearly correct.

That was in 2012. The data is way outdated. The vast majority of young voters nowadays are swaying democrat.

Now, assuming:

- old people vote in far larger proportion compared to young folks

- they tend to vote conservative

- this virus is likely to kill old people disproportionately

- red states tend to do less well in terms of all kinds of infrastructure, including medical

...then would you expect to see a change in the results of future elections?