GOP Attempts to Suppress Voting Bite Them on Ass

[sofa king]

38. If you think that's bad....

I recently gave up on an article I was going to write about the effects of Republican rule over the past decade. The statistics were unfortunately beyond my easy use or verification, but here's where I was going with it:

* While life expectancy on average has risen from 2000-2010, it has actually dropped steeply in Southern states, I think particularly in counties under strong Republican control. Poverty and race do not appear to be the reason; poor education, however, does appear to be related. In the meantime, extremely affluent people are living much longer, enough to skew the overall life expectancy, but representing an insignificant fraction of voters.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/15/national/main20071192.shtml

* The areas with the lowest life expectancies also appear to be the areas under the strongest Republican control. Smoking, obesity, low education, and high blood pressure appear in higher concentrations in those areas.

* The argument I was trying to make was that conservatism was the ultimate cause of increased death rates in those areas. Low education rates go hand in hand with poor health and political conservatism (you really do have to be stupid to be poor and Republican at the same time). Poor conservatives are also less likely to fully utilize the tattered remnants of our social safety net.

Now, I wished to argue, that combination is killing voters and damaging their health at an increased rate.

I was unable to come up with actual statistical estimates, but what I thought I could show was that the next election would be materially affected by the mass die-off of stupid conservatives, and that the die-off was directly related to Republican attempts to stymie health care reform, to keep the minimum wage low, to spike the economy while President Obama is in office, and to maintain tax breaks for the wealthy.

The result, I predict, is going to be several million fewer conservative voters nationwide in the 2012 election. Many of them will be dead as a result of the policies they enthusiastically endorsed; as many or more will be in a poor state of health come November and will be less likely to vote. Still more of them will be statistically indistinguishable from the voters that Republicans are intending to suppress, will also fall victim to Republican voter suppression efforts, and will be less capable of jumping through the administrative hoops that were set up to prevent their smarter neighbors from voting.

By backing a tiny, very wealthy sub-set of American voters, Republican policy has actually managed to kill off a significant chunk of their voting base. It amuses me to no end to think that America's conservatives, who have wasted so much time and effort fighting socialism and Darwinism, are about to screw themselves by killing off their voter base through the imperfect practice of social Darwinism.

Maybe I should shoot my thoughts over to Ruy Texiera and see if he can do anything with it. I'm probably totally full of crap, though, because I'm a terrible statistician.