Before the Jan 6th Insurrection occurred, I actually sat down, gathered all the relevant electoral, polling, and covid data, and did the math to answer this question:
What if the rampant hysteria from covid denial had not happened? What if counties and cities that went red had actually implemented and adopted the mean of covid policies that areas that went blue did, and had percapita death rates to go along with those?
Answer: Trump might have actually won. Not the popular vote, but electorally.
He likely literally killed his chances at re-election via promoting covid denialism, leading to a greatly oversized proportion of deaths amongst areas more likely to vote for him, that could have flipped some states red if that had not happened.
Before the Jan 6th Insurrection occurred, I actually sat down, gathered all the relevant electoral, polling, and covid data, and did the math to answer this question:
What if the rampant hysteria from covid denial had not happened? What if counties and cities that went red had actually implemented and adopted the mean of covid policies that areas that went blue did, and had percapita death rates to go along with those?
Answer: Trump might have actually won. Not the popular vote, but electorally.
He likely literally killed his chances at re-election via promoting covid denialism, leading to a greatly oversized proportion of deaths amongst areas more likely to vote for him, that could have flipped some states red if that had not happened.