The Political Landscape of Colorado and COVID-19 Deaths
By Hayden Beck
The beautiful state of Colorado is home to many people from all walks of life. Rich, poor, military, civilian, conservative, liberal, and so much more. For better or for worse, there seems to be an ever increasing number of categories in which we relegate people into like chess pieces. For whatever reason, it seems to be human nature to assign extra value to some qualities while completely ignoring others. While perhaps heartless, these categories are often so neat and precise that a statistician could have a field day discovering new connections between the intersections people find themselves in and the data they produce. For instance, several weeks ago I wrote a piece on the relationship between education and disability. But as the dust settled and my thoughts on the matter concluded, I was left with a question. In a world so consumed with categories and the associations between them and the real world, what else exists? What other connections can be made? How do our innate biases as thinking, feeling individuals affect our actual lives? Perhaps I was mistaken when I said I was left with a question.
When most people hear the state’s nickname of “Colorful Colorado” they think of the diverse environment and landscape within the confines of the beautiful state of Colorado. The mountains, the rivers, the plains, the deserts, the cities, and so much more can be found in this rectangular state. But as someone who has lived here all my life, I think of it more in terms of the weather. One second it is snowing, the next second it is sunny. In elementary school I remember school would be canceled in the morning because of icy roads and blizzards, but by noon the world was bone dry and sunny. But as my experience with information and data analytics has grown, I realize that “Colorful Colorado” could mean any number of things. Blame the creator of the nickname for their lack of specificity. And for the purposes of this piece, I will say this: Colorado is indeed unique in many ways, but if one were to look through a political lens, they would see a landscape not occupied by mountains and rivers, but rather a land filled to the edge with a diverse range of political beliefs and a spectrum of associated consequences ranging from perhaps good… to potentially bad.
One such political controversy that has, for some reason, been particularly debated amongst the different political parties is the COVID-19 pandemic. On one side there are the Democrats, who are very wary of the virus, supporting vaccine mandates, quarantine, and more precautions to stem its spread. And on the other side we have the Republicans, who support personal choice free of consequence and individual responsibility over mandated vaccinations and quarantine. With these differing beliefs come differing consequences because of the differences in behavior. Fortunately for those curious, like myself, this debate happens to be a perfect analytical device for spotting variations amongst people of varying backgrounds. And due to Colorado’s political “purpleness,” meaning the state is both Democrat and Republican, though leaning the former more heavily, and there is no better setting for an analysis between parties. In this piece I will be looking at the differences between Democrats and Republicans with regard to COVID-19 deaths.
Firstly, like all states in the United States, Colorado is divided into counties. Each citizen in said counties is capable of voting. Using a spreadsheet containing information pertaining to all U.S. counties, I was able to filter out all counties not belonging to the state of Colorado. From there, I needed to get a feel for the political landscape, so I found all counties who’s majority voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. I now had two datasets: the first containing all ‘red’ counties, those who primarily voted for Trump, and all ‘blue’ counties, those who primarily voted for Biden.
Here is a graph containing the number of deaths to COVID-19 in all ‘red’ counties. El Paso County had the highest number of deaths with 1,605 and Hinsdale had the least number of deaths with 0. Overall, there were a total of 4,811 deaths and an average of 126 deaths per county shown on the graph above.
Here is a graph containing the number of deaths to COVID-19 in all ‘blue’ counties. Adams County had the highest number of deaths with 1,315 and San Juan had the least number of deaths with 0. Overall, there were a total of 7,356 deaths and an average of 272 deaths per county shown on the graph above.
To get an accurate understanding of COVID-19 deaths in Colorado as a whole, please refer to the below graph. It is important to visualize Colorado as a whole as well as by its various aspects. Out of all counties in Colorado, El Paso county had the highest number of deaths while the state average was 189 deaths per county.
While there are significantly more deaths in Democrat aligned counties, it is important to note that said counties typically have a much higher population. Therefore, the only true way to understand how political affiliation impacts COVID-19 deaths is to find if there is any correlation between them.
Here we have a scatterplot depicting all Colorado counties and the number of COVID-19 deaths in relation to what percentage of the population voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. While not strictly necessary, for the sake of clarity the more Democrat leaning counties are colored blue while the more Republican leaning counties are colored red. Additionally, the number of COVID-19 deaths can be visualized by the size of the bubbles. The question now is, what does this graph tell us? There is no obvious relationship between political affiliation and COVID-19 deaths just by looking at the graph, so in order to get an accurate answer, I will need to run a correlation analysis.
The relationship between counties voting for Trump in the 2020 election and COVID-19 deaths is as follows: There is a relatively weak negative correlation (Pearson’s r = -0.29). This is not a strong correlation, but nonetheless points out a trend. These two variables move in opposite directions, regardless of strength. As voting for Trump increased, COVID-19 deaths decreased. So it would seem that ‘blue’ counties see a larger number of deaths than ‘red counties.’
Now the question is “Why?” Well, I have no real way of analyzing the data to find an answer, but logic dictates that there are several reasons. Mainly, Democrat counties are significantly more urbanized than Republican counties. El Paso county, the largest Republican county in terms of population, has an area of 2,130 mi² and a population of 737,867 (2021), while Denver County, the largest Democrat county in terms of population, has an area of 153 mi² and a population of 727,211 (2019). That would be 346 people per square mile in the former and 4742 people per square mile in the latter. That means El Paso County has just 7% the number of people per square mile that Denver County. Logically, given the significantly denser population in Denver county, it makes sense that COVID-19 virus, a virus spread between people, is more likely to spread. But this is just a hypothetical.
In order to substantiate my hypothesis, I looked at Relationship between population density and COVID-19 incidence and mortality estimates: A county-level analysis, a study by Paulo R. Martins-Filho. In the study, researchers organized counties in the United States based on population density before running their analysis. Filho had this to say regarding his results, “Population density has been found as a potential indicator of infection spread which suggests that in densely populated areas more stringent policies or implementations of distancing may be considered” (Filho). Interestingly, the study found an incredibly weak correlation between population density and infectious spread, but perhaps more interestingly, it found that more densely populated areas have more rigorous COVID-19 protocols to stem the spread.
Overall, my results were very unexpected. Given that Republican counties had less deaths than Democrat counties despite my aforementioned understanding of typical Republican sentiments regarding pandemic precautions such as vaccination and quarantine. I initially suspected that Republican counties would have significantly more deaths than Democrat counties. Regardless of the direction of the correlation, it is still a very weak one and should not hold sway over anyone’s opinions. This analysis supplements current research into the differences between people of different political ideologies. If a lesson is to be learned from this particular analysis, it is that perhaps categorizing people by things such as beliefs is not always conclusive and alternative reasons could be at play. In the future, it would be interesting to do this analysis again while treating population density as a mediator of sorts. Furthermore, while no statistical analysis of significance was conducted, further comparisons between Colorado counties might reveal actual differences caused by qualities such as political ideology.
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