Virus Deaths in Democratic versus Republican States

When controlling for the differences in population across states, the number of deaths from coronavirus is over three times higher in states with Democratic governors than in states with Republican governors. As of Sunday, April 26, states with Republican governors have experienced 57.53 coronavirus deaths per million of population, states with Democratic governors have 179.74 deaths per million of population. Even excluding the state of New York as an extreme outlier, states with Democratic governors have 138.58 deaths per million from coronavirus, still over twice as many coronavirus deaths per million as deaths in states with Republican governors.[1]

It merits emphasis from the get-go that this relationship is obviously not directly causal. The inauguration of Kentucky’s new Democratic governor on December 10, 2019 did not triple the state’s subsequent mortality from the coronavirus relative to what it would have been had Republican incumbent Matt Bevin been reelected.

The dramatically different death rates between states with Republican and Democratic governors, however, illuminates two issues concerning state-level responses to the coronavirus. First, the dramatically lower death rates in Republican states account for the willingness of Republican governors to consider relaxed shelter-in-place policies relative to governors in Democratic states. As is appropriate in a federal system where significant policy responsibility continues to be exercised at the state level, a shelter-in-place policy appropriate for New York would not necessarily work well in Wyoming. Governors should be encouraged, not condemned, for pursuing policies tailored to the unique characteristics of their states.

Secondly, however, the question, “what did he know and when did he know it,” is not merely a question to ask the President regarding national-level policy responses to the coronavirus threat since February. The near-certainty of a global pandemic of some sort has been well-known in policy circles for decades. The unique demographic characteristics of each state that make them more or less susceptible to pandemic contagion are best known to state politicians, especially state governors. In the U.S. constitutional system in which state governments uniquely hold police powers—defined to be general authority to protect the health, safety, welfare and morality of the people (a power that the US national government does not have today and has never had)—it is a fair question to ask why so many state governors were caught unprepared. Particularly governors in states that had well known characteristics, like large, cosmopolitan cities, likely to exacerbate the risk of pandemic contagion.

Tocqueville observed that the U.S. has a “complex constitution.” Note the small “c.” In discussing the nation’s complex constitution, he was not writing of the complexity of written state and national Constitutions. He was rather discussing how the entire system of governance in the U.S. was constituted – state governments with the national government. Needless to say, the size of the U.S. national government is dramatically different today than it was in the 1830s. At the same time, it remains completely false to suggest that states no longer retain significant authority over vast domains of policy within their states. This is true as a formal Constitutional matter in that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently denied that the U.S. national government has police power and continues to insist only state governments hold that power—except in limited areas where delegated to the national government. And it is true empirically as well.

For as large as the national government is, state governments nonetheless spend almost as much in total as the national government spends. Even in the exercise of power over everyday life, criminal and civil matters continue to be overwhelmingly defined and litigated under the authority of the states and not under the authority of the national government.

The advantage of a federal system is that it combines the advantages that large nations enjoy with the benefits of small ones. It is a virtue of federal systems that states can craft policies to their unique circumstances. Tocqueville observed that “In centralized great nations, the legislator is obliged to give a uniform character to the laws which does not encompass the diversity of places and mores.”

If the Democrats were so smart and caring, then why this huge divergence of death rates between Republican and Democratic states?

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The idea that a nation as large and diverse as the U.S. should have a one-size-fits-all national “shelter-in-place” policy is absurd on its face. Yet so much of the mainstream media’s commentary ignores the variation in state-level experience, and criticizes Republican governors for precipitately re-opening their states. This does not mean that Republican governors are necessarily right, but they’re certainly not wrong simply for not aping the policies of Democratic governors.