Are Democrat-led states handling COVID-19 better than Republican-led states?

Question

If Democrats are more pro-science than Republicans, and if science helps control COVID-19, then it sounds logical that US states with a Democratic governor will handle COVID-19 better than those with a Republican governor.

Does this bear out in practice? If the answer is "no", what could explain the apparent contradiction?

If there's no clear relation between the affiliation of the governor & performance with respect to COVID-19, I'm also interested if there's a relation between the affiliation of the population (i.e. if the state has more Republican/Democratic voters) & performance.

Edit: by "better", I mean flattening the curve of cases. This is the one and only metric I care about.

Answer 1

The metric the question mentions is 'flattening the curve of cases'. There is some debate on how to measure this, but the specific metric I've decided to use is to fit a polynomial curve to the graph of cases over time, starting from when each state recorded their 100th case. I then take the second derivative of this curve, and evaluate it at the current date (June 29th), giving us the rate of change of the slope. This is our 'curve-flattening score'.

To give an example, let's look at the graph of cases over time for New York and Texas, shown below. Clearly, in raw numerical terms, New York has far more cases than Texas. One way to measure the handling of the pandemic would be to look at this number. On the other hand, if we look at the trajectory of the curve, New York's curve is flattening off, while Texas appears to be getting steeper. This latter metric is what I will be using in my analysis.

Using this metric, we get the following heatmap, with a higher number representing a worse outcome. We can compare this to the next map showing the party of the state governor. Note that Alaska & Hawaii are omitted in the first map, but are included in the full data below.

Looking at the governor of each state, we can see that the three states with the lowest score are are Texas, Florida & Arizona, all with Republican governors, although these are then followed by the Democrat-governed California and Illinois. Of the worst ten states, seven have Republican governors. Looking at the states judged to be handling the pandemic best by this metric, all of the top five, New York, Michigan, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Virginia are governed by Democrats, and eight of the top ten.

Removing outliers (values outside [-150, 150]), the average Democrat-governed state has a 'curve-flattening score' of -7.66, while the average Republican-governed state has a score of 20.05. This, again, suggests that Democratic governors are handling the pandemic better in their states than their Republican colleagues, based on this metric.

Based solely on this limited analysis, then, it seems that Democratic-governed states are flattening the curve of cases better than Republican-governed states.

Full data:

           State       Value       Party
        New York -270.716627    democrat
        Michigan -141.942838    democrat
      New Jersey  -82.264133    democrat
       Louisiana  -77.507513    democrat
        Virginia  -39.734256    democrat
        Maryland  -34.473446  republican
     Connecticut  -29.163433    democrat
    Pennsylvania  -21.205778    democrat
       Wisconsin  -19.795953    democrat
    South Dakota   -2.257446  republican
         Vermont   -1.847893  republican
      Washington   -1.718445    democrat
           Maine   -1.501176  republican
          Alaska   -0.931880  republican
    Rhode Island   -0.076976    democrat
   West Virginia    0.298186    democrat
   New Hampshire    0.380728  republican
          Hawaii    0.660018    democrat
  North Carolina    0.816185    democrat
         Montana    1.903081    democrat
    North Dakota    2.529137  republican
         Wyoming    3.486826  republican
        Kentucky    5.186839  republican
      New Mexico    6.325482    democrat
        Delaware   11.543138    democrat
        Colorado   12.881185    democrat
         Alabama   13.993028  republican
        Arkansas   14.869030  republican
        Missouri   14.881671  republican
          Oregon   16.153599    democrat
         Indiana   16.677088  republican
           Idaho   18.562333  republican
            Utah   19.872332  republican
       Minnesota   24.596237    democrat
     Mississippi   25.444759  republican
        Nebraska   26.300690  republican
          Nevada   28.483117    democrat
       Tennessee   37.187872  republican
        Oklahoma   40.680940  republican
            Ohio   41.395639  republican
            Iowa   44.830352  republican
          Kansas   48.995664    democrat
   Massachusetts   49.924742  republican
         Georgia   71.282481  republican
  South Carolina   74.612648  republican
        Illinois   99.889327    democrat
      California  187.667507    democrat
         Arizona  236.048719  republican
         Florida  356.647006  republican
           Texas  406.084270  republican

Answer 2

I calculated average case increases for the last 60 days, and took the ratio of that to all cases. Thus, the smaller the ratio, the more it indicates that the current case increases are far less than the peak, hence indicating a flattening of the slope.

The data is below.

I then ran a two-sample t-test for means. There is overwhelming evidence that the mean for Democrat-led states is smaller than the corresponding mean for Republican-led states. The means are (D: 0.009, R: 0.011) and the p-value under the null hypothesis of equal means is 0.005995, which is evidence against the null hypothesis.

One could argue that NYC, New Jersey, Hawaii, Guam, Virgin Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico are obvious outliers for different reasons (NYC/NJ being hit the hardest first, and the other being islands). I removed them both, re-did the analysis, and found that the p-value increases (obviously) but under the null-hypothesis of equal means, the p-value is 0.12. This is still small, and combined with the case where we did not remove outliers, speaks to some evidence that Democrat-led states have done better at flattening the slope.

Conclusion: Yes, the data does suggest that on average, Democrat-led states are doing better at handling the pandemic than Republican-led states, in terms of current performance versus peak performance.

Answer 3

No, Democratic states are much worse

First, let's define our criteria. COVID-19 didn't cause such panic because it was simply spreading. It is a deadly disease. Therefore, best criteria is number of deaths, and number of deaths per capita. Number of infected and percentage of deaths per infections are not very reliable metrics, because they depend on testing - less testing, less infected. Number of deaths is also not completely reliable metric (has person died from COVID-19 or from some accompanying co-morbidity ?) but is far less susceptible to errors.

Having said that, there is a list of states with Democratic and Republican governors and for COVID-19 we could use Worldmeters as this site is reasonably accurate and up to date. As we could see, Blue states lead in both categories, total number of deaths and deaths per 1M , with New York being worst in total number of deaths, and New Jersey in deaths per capita . Even larger Red states like Texas are much further down the list. Several reasons could be given :

• Ostensibly, Democratic states have larger density of population (big cities) which could explain easier spread of infection. This is one and maybe only mitigating circumstance that could be used to defend governors of these states.

• Medical blunders like putting COVID-19 patients in nursing homes devastated elderly population in New York. Similarly, overuse of ventilators caused its own deaths trough lung damage that could be prevented.

• War on HCQ cost its own lives. Supposedly "respected" doctors and scientists like Mandeep R. Mehra spent their time on pompously promoted study about HCQ deficiencies, which was latter retracted with great shame. Meanwhile, deaths in Massachusetts (especially Boston) skyrocketed. Similar pattern was seen in other Democratic states - medical professionals used so called "science" as a cover for their own unwillingness to adapt to this new and almost unprecedented situation.

• Finally, it must be said that in order to display PC behavior, governors of Democratic states at the beginning of epidemics shunned all advice to curtail public gatherings like Chinese New Year despite known threat back then. Democrats also criticized Trump's travel ban on March 1 as "racists".

Overall, image cultivated in MSM of Democratic states being more "educated" and "scientific" is simply not true. Democrats simply have more academic and media establishment on their side, but their results are, simply saying, much worse then Republican states, and are in fact among worst in the world.