As of this writing, Trump's lead over Biden in Georgia is only 1,805 votes. Per the CDC, there have been 8,305 COVID-19 deaths in Georgia. In the interest of science, I created a spreadsheet to quantify whether or not Trump's mismanagement and downplaying of the "Democrat hoax China flu" might have cost him Georgia's 16 electoral votes.
First, I looked up the number of COVID-19 deaths in Georgia by county. Then I looked at both Biden's and Trump's current vote share in each Georgia county. Applying the vote percentages to the deaths, I can estimate how many potential votes Biden and Trump each lost because their supporters died from COVID-19 before the election. My findings are as follows:
Trump voter deaths: 4317
Biden voter deaths: 3941
Third-party voter deaths: 96
As a result of this, Trump missed out on netting an additional +375 votes over Biden because those supporters are dead. However, there are a few flawed assumptions here. First, I'm assuming that everyone who died of COVID is eligible to vote and would have indeed cast a ballot. Second, it's probably the case that COVID is disproportionately killing Trump supporters even in deep blue counties because they are more likely to not wear a mask and flaunt social distancing guidelines. I'm unsure how much of a modifier I should add to the death counts to reflect this. Any suggestions?
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