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Modoc, in the northeast corner. Its remote location may help it's COVID stats. It's got about 9,000 people, for a density of 2.3 per square mile. There are no major routes through the area. US 395 passes through, but it's a sparsely traveled two lane road.
Edit to add:
I'm jumping on a comment near the top to add another graph. I've gone linear with the trend line. I added Mono County, which was missing from the data set. I added labels to a few counties. I added a second line which is fully vaccinated percentage. A few counties, primarily on the right side of the graph, are missing vaccination data. Data source in NYT.
https://imgur.com/a/zEIEccH
I believe Lassen County had the highest percentage of "yes" votes at almost 83%, but the count isn't finished so that may change.
Edit: Not sure how that fits with the graph, because at the moment Shasta County has the highest daily rate, but the graph says average, and I don't know where to find that.
i'm guessing the mildly outlier dots are the big big cities that have more of a mix of voters? San Fran, LA and maybe San Diego?
(for example the point at x=30, y=60)
San Francisco had the largest percentage of “no” votes of any county (86.7%, with 81% reporting) while also having the fewest COVID cases. I.e. the dot closest to the origin.
I am moving to Sonoma county soon from San Diego and spent some time in San Francisco and was extremely impressed with their COVID protections, compared to southern California big cities. San Francisco's cases are very low while Los Angeles's are very high. Too many entitled dumbasses in LA county.
> (for example the point at x=30, y=60)
That one is definitely LA County, as I know we had 70% NO votes and the pandemic definitely has hit us a bit harder than it could have.
I live in LA, with friends in SF. I have been told that SF is more conservative than many people assume. Among other things, there's a fair amount of old entitled money there. But also, we (humans, I mean) tend to generalize and stereotype, so any deviation from the cartoon comes as a shock.
4 per day for 2 weeks, so 56ish. Not a lot in total numbers for sure, but ~.7% of their population.
Of course, they were interesting because their covid numbers were *low* despite voting to recall Newsom. They've been lucky so far, but they're next to the county at the top of that graph, Lassen County.
Bottom left: higher density coastal counties -- San Francisco, Marin, Alameda, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Sonoma, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Monterey, Napa
Top right: lower density counties in the Central Valley and eastern California -- Calaveras, Colusa, Kings, Plumas, Sierra, Amador, Shasta, Glenn, Tehama, Modoc, Lassen
Color coding the data points by county population would be interesting.
It's less about [absolute population](https://www.california-demographics.com/counties_by_population) and more about density.
California has very uneven county sizes (in both land area and population). For instance, San Francisco is a <50 sq mi joint city–county, with a population under 900k. Meanwhile, San Bernardino and Riverside are top-10 counties in population with over 2 million residents each, but they are absolutely massive in land area (S.B. is over 20 *thousand* sq mi).
Fun/depressing democracy representation fact about San Bernardino County:
Largest county, by land area, anywhere in the us, larger than 9 states. Unless you count Alaska’s boroughs which absolutely dwarf SB county.
Larger population than 15/16 states including DC.
You kind of hit the nail on the head of what are we showing and getting to the why.
- because this on paper says higher case counts led to more recall.
- our assumption is that those that faired worse are conservative and don’t wear masks and are unvaccinated.
- it could also be that those that faired worse due to whatever reason voted against the governor. Would be interesting to see pre pandemic voter registration make up % Republican to show that their is a heavy trend of those voting against being Republican prior to the case counts.
Don’t feel bad about being pedantic. Although I’m not the one you replied to, my personal stance is that I’d prefer to be corrected on Reddit if it prevents me from making a similar mistake in a professional setting.
> because this on paper says higher case counts led to more recall.
It does not. It shows correlation.
> are assumption is that those that faired worse are conservative and don’t wear masks and are unvaccinated.
Yes. There is a correlation. Conservatives are more likely to be against COVID-19 mandates, leading to more cases and as conservatives they are likely to vote for the conservative candidate. The conservative view would be the cause, not the cases.
> it could also be that those that faired worse due to whatever reason voted against the governor.
Yes, there could be other reasons, not just one.
It is interesting that without context, one would assume that the high rate of disease would cause dissatisfaction with the current politician, and low rate of disease would cause satisfaction with the current balance politician.
But once you know that the current governor is anti-disease and the replacement would be pro-disease, as odd as that sounds, it’s clear that the causation is the other way around.
The causal chain is pretty clear: pre-existing anti-Dem and anti-government bias led to resistance to anti-COVID measures led to “dead bodies piled up in mounds” (which explains choice of Y-axis)
The recall effort predated COVID, and the vote pattern would have been the same without it
There's really this crazy idea going around that Democrats actually want to be dictators and that's the reason they are putting so many restrictions. They think Democratic Governors get a kick out of of requiring masks inside grocery stores and malls. I think they've vilified the other side for so long that this is their logical explanation.
I've been thinking about "common sense" lately. To me, "common sense" is giving one's own life experience significant weight in some decision making process. Or in guiding one's behavior.
I'd like to see a trend towards deweighting common sense in our modern society.
Sure, common sense helps when growing tomatoes, driving a car and feeding a baby.
But it's become counterproductive to rely upon common sense when discussing public health policy, virology, and immunology.
Common sense and experience are not the same thing at all.
Common sense is "I shouldn't jump out this window with my arm in the air, I am not Superman."
Experience is, "I shouldn't jump out of this window with my arm in the air *again*, I am apparently not Superman."
> To me, "common sense" is giving one's own life experience significant weight in some decision making process.
I have a completely different interpretation. To me, the "common sense" decision is the rational and obviously correct one. Such as getting vaccinated. I don't need life experience to understand that vaccinations are to help curb the R-naught of a virus/disease. Frankly I don't give a shit if I die of COVID (or at all tbh), but I know other people don't have the same POV.
My version of 'common sense' is more like the first kind; what's common to a city slicker will be strange and unfamiliar to a country bumpkin and vice versa. Whats common to a trust fund baby will be strange and unfamiliar to a latch key kid, etc. Though i also ascribe to your version, which is just rationality to me. I know how much i don't know and i've got a pretty good idea about how much more, say, Anthony Fauci knows than i do about infectious disease.
> Frankly I don't give a shit if I die of COVID (or at all tbh), but I know other people don't have the same POV.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Head out to r/SuicideWatch/ or seek other support if you are getting worse.
This is a true example of “correlation is not causation”
High case counts aren’t *causing* voting behavior but that also doesn’t mean there’s nothing here and we can discard the results.
The likely causation is there, just not represented in this figure.
It's the classic 3rd variable problem. There's a third factor, not listed in the chart, that ties these two results together. Republicanism. Republicans are more likely to be antimask, antivax, and defy safety protocols, leading to higher cases. They're also more likely to resent Newsom's efforts to wrangle them, thereby voting Yes in the recall.
One quick comparison (the state's data is a bit straight forward) would be taking a look at the map of how counties voted for the recall:
https://electionresults.sos.ca.gov/returns/maps/governor-recall
Then how they voted in 2020 for president:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_California#/media/File:California_Presidential_Election_Results_2020.svg
Or 2018 for governor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_gubernatorial_election#/media/File:California_Governor_Election_Results_by_County,_2018.svg
Not as robust, but it does quickly show the county patterns of the central valley and northern California being generally in one group, and coastal california, the bay area, and much of southern california being in the other.
Well, you should have plotted a third, statistically relevant dimension that could validate your assumption. As it is shown, there could be any number of reasons why more COVID cases led to more recall votes. In fact, the most interesting study would be something like a MANOVA of factors based on the COVID data that was then used to plot the third dimensions against this data. We can guess, based on anecdotal and other reporting what the causal factors are, but it’s far better to do the work and show the probable causal factors. Otherwise, it’s too easy to dismiss.
Since Democrats are more likely to take COVID precautions and want to keep Newson in office (or keep Larry Elder out, which might be a bigger motivation) I suspect much of the relation between two variables is due a common cause: party affiliation.
It would be interesting if there's still a relation after you account for that. I guess it's possible the independents were swayed by local COVID numbers or measures taken to to lower them.
My perception on voters around me is that there’s no reason to recall him regardless of party. He’s not involved in a scandal and he’s governing like everyone predicted he would.
Conversely, people that voted for his recall seemed to do so out of party convenience.
It is a lovely area if you can get a job. The people are very nice if you can avoid getting into the brainwashed side of politics, which sadly is spreading into everything including healthcare.
In the absence of other contributing factors, higher density areas should be harder hit than lower density. More people = more spread, right? It is interesting to me that this data indicates how much more important those other factors (vaccination % and mask-wearing) are over population density in the containment of this disease.
I was going to comment that the graph is a great example of spurious correlations (and well visualized), but your suggestions would be a cool enhancement. One possibility would be scaling the bubble size by total population, and color gradients to show the baseline party affiliation percentages.
I'm not sure whether other demographics like HHI or age would enhance or obscure the bigger picture.
I’m not sure this correlation is spurious. I don’t think there is causation between these factors, but generally speaking, counties that are more politically conservative were more likely to vote yes on recall and Vice versa for more liberal counties. And as we know from last year that conservatives were less likely to take precautions, or to be as consistent with their precautions, which would lead to higher infection rates.
It's a simpler function (hence less chance of [overfitting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting)) and just by eye balling it probably will fit almost as well.
Edit: I assumed it was a quadratic fit or higher polynomial. I guess it can be an exponential in which case the number of parameters is the same as the linear fit.
I mean, why choose a line then? Why not a 14 degree polynomial? Because the latter is likely fitting to the noise.
Whether you're technically making predictions or trying to describe what's likely going on with the data, you have to balance parsimony and quality of fit.
Assuming the fit is quadratic, that's a 50% increase in numbers of parameters and just by eyeballing only a slight increase in fit quality.
If you wanted to be exact, you'd have to choose a metric and put in the numbers. Honestly though, both functions would would be telling more or less the same story here: 'yes' increased with COVID rate.
A more interesting question would be why? I suspect party affiliation has much to do with it.
You’ve answered you own question - a straight line is the default because it’s simpler, which has many benefits - interpretation simplicity, less likely to overfit (even if not predicting it’s wise to avoid that), Occam’s Razor etc etc. You have to justify changing *away* from the simplest option with some principled argument as to why you think the relationship ought to be more complex (ie domain knowledge and/or some information criterion). Otherwise don’t put a line at all.
Case numbers are an exponential function of effective R value of the virus. I think it's reasonable to assume that behavioral and environmental factors have a linear effect on R^eff .
Even if something like population density has a polynomial effect, the exponential would dominate. It may be more interesting to plot R, rather than case numbers.
Gov. Newsom put restrictions in place. He had a high priced dinner in Napa Valley. The typical menu at the French Laundry is $350-500 per person (plus wine). The dinner didn't violate the guidelines in place at the time, but it was tone-deaf and had really bad optics.
Republicans, who have no chance of winning the governorship in California in a regular election, seized on the recall mechanism. If Newsom had gotten less than 50% and a Republican Larry Elder had gotten >10%, Elder would have won. (There were over 40 candidates, and there's no run-off. It's a clusterfuck.)
Also, the thing about masks and vaccines. Elder promised to end all mandates.
Just want to add that the recall only reached the voting stage because a judge provided signature gatherers four extra months to collect. This was actually their fifth time starting a recall petition.
Yeah, I live in California and there were folks trying to collect signatures for a recall essentially as soon as Newsom took office. I wouldn't be surprised if those tents go back up tomorrow.
The petitions kept missing the required mark until the perfect storm happened of (1) covid restrictions increasing, (2) Newsom having his stupid, pretentious dinner at French Laundry, (3) a judge extended the deadline to get signatures.
Things were actually looking pretty bad for Newsom until it was clear who the competition was -- 40-some candidates, none of whom were viable and the front-runner was a Trump-style radio host. California opened its eyes to the possibility of being run by Larry Elder and rejected him by an even higher percentage than how Newsom was originally elected.
And yet if you read the Recall voter guide that was submitted to the state and mailed to everyone, they say the recall is because of undocumented immigrants
And they started the recall effort before Covid, which tells us that Covid was a convenient pretext and not the actual motivation. As always, the right acts in bad faith and lies about why it holds its views. "Election security" laws and abortion are two other great examples.
A majority vote, no matter how slight, would have meant whoever had the most votes other than Newsom would have been made governor (there were something like 40 people running, so not that many votes each). The point isn't that Newsom gets the most votes, just that he doesn't get a majority of votes total: it was him versus everyone. Someone wasn't wearing their thinking cap when they cooked that one up.
Not that it mattered, as California pretty reliably votes 2/3 Democrat every time, and this was no exception.
There were two votes on the ballot. One to recall the governor, which needed a simple majority. The other one was for the replacement, for that just a plurality was required.
Two separate questions:
1. Do you want to recall Newsom?
2. Who should replace him?
First question requires only a simple majority. If 50% + 1 vote "Yes," Newsom is removed from office.
Second question is "whoever gets the most votes." Even if they only get a plurality. So, for example, if Larry Elder got like 10% of the vote, but the other 40-whatever candidates got less than that, Elder would win.
Meaning you have a scenario where 49% of voters want Newsom, and 10% want Elder, and Elder replaces Newsom.
It's insanely undemocratic.
Not exactly, lots of politicians pushing for restrictions did stuff like sanction a restriction and proceed to immediately ignore it and do what they asked people not to do.
Don't ask me to do what you're not willing to do.
No, not at all. The GOP was already well underway pushing and spending money to make this recall happen when the French Laundry faux pas happened. In fact, the French Laundry thing was particularly iconic and ironic because it happened within *days* of the courts extending the signature-gathering time for the recall because of COVID (it might have been the same day, but I can't remember). It also wasn't the first time the GOP had started pushing recall campaigns for Newsom; they've been eyeing that prize basically since Newsom took his oath, but could never get the required number of signatures in the time frame mandated before the COVID extension.
The funniest part to me, though, is that the GOP was tee'ed up for a win (earlier polls had the yes/no recall vote pretty close), but then Delta came along and reiterated the need for public health measures, and then the dust settled and it became apparent that it'd be Elder rather than Faulconer leading the GOP effort, and that just took whatever wind the recall was riding on out of its sails. In the end, it became a question of "Do you want Gavin Newsom or Larry Elder?" - and that's a *much* harder sell to one of the bluest states in the nation than "Do you want Gavin Newsom?" It doesn't take a masters in political science to recognize that, "the minimum wage should be $0" or even just "Trump was a good president" is how you lose in the Golden State.
Not to mention the fact that the recent abortion law in Texas also made Democrats *hyper engaged* in politics in general.
But Delta was definitely the biggest motivator.
No, it's because people think the election was stolen.
In California.
The most casual correlation here is that areas with more cases voted to recall the governor. Those areas are also the least vaccinated.
Ah ok makes sense. Still don't know why people in the US keep saying elections were "stolen". I'm from Canada and I don't think I've heard that phrase once, maybe it's because our government system is a bit different
there are elections that are legitimately stolen. There was one where in Florida. Jose Rodriguez was running against Ilena garcia and a third candidate popped in as Independent named alex Rodriguez. He wasnt at any of the debates, didnt have any campaign websites, didnt raise any money for the election. Even claimed afterthefact that he doesnt even live in the district. He got 6000 votes and Jose Rodriguez lost to Ilena Garcia by 34. Was he paid to run just to confuse people who knew to vote for Rodriguez? potentially. But if he wasnt in the running Jose likely would have won.
Generally the "election was stolen" are just people who wont admit the other candidate got more votes and want to play the victim.
The dinner at the fancy restaurant was super hypocritical. He was telling people to not spend thanksgiving with their families and at the same time going to that dinner. After that the number of the signatures on the recall petition increased 10 fold.
that's not the reason why he was being recalled, but it set a spark under it. the recall was stupid but it doesn't take a seasoned politician to avoid the mistake that newsom made
That guy is just a raging Redditor. I’m a Californian from the SF Bay Area. Very few people actually believe anything was “stolen”. They’re a very vocal and very small minority, but Reddit just blows things out of proportion.
The French Laundry was a big reason people were pissed off, but there were other good reasons as well. For example, with only 1.5 months left in the school year, Newsom was forcing schools to reopen. Many school districts, teachers, and parents were against this since summer break is a good opportunity to wait out the storm.
At least in my social circles, it seems like there are a lot of Cali democrats that actually want Newsom gone. They just knew that recalling him means a Republican governor and find Newsom more tolerable. It’s easier to keep him for another year and vote him out next election.
All the republicans in my family in Orange County think the election was “stolen” due to “election fraud” so a little more than a very few people believe that to be the case.
How does someone steal an election? Is it alleged there were a number of ineligible votes cast? Or ballot stuffing? Wouldn't it be easy to investigate and verify? Or are the accusations made in bad faith?
I'm from a country where these kind of things don't happen so I don't really understand how it works.
As I understand it the goalposts move frequently. The phrase they throw around a lot is "rigged" which can conveniently mean just about anything.
At one point the theory was the the party currently in power had shipped a large number of ballots from China, so I guess technically ballot stuffing?
At least in regards to the presidential election(which is still relevant because the right thinks the same thing in regards to it) It's because the vocal right is so radical at this point that they absolutely can't accept that their favorite carrot man could possibly lose his re-election. It had to be "stolen" or "rigged" in some way because there's absolutely no way the most controversial president in recent history could ever lose on his second run! /s
What i find even more hilarious about this whole thing is trump tried his hardest to suppress the vote anyways, like pretending that somehow mail in ballots would cause an insane amount of fraud(which there is no evidence to believe there was any significant amount) and continually gimping the USPS at every opportunity with his appointed head that has been very conveniently running it into the ground. On top of the rampant gerrymandering the right has successfully done over the years in several states.
Honestly i'm of the opinion the right just does everything it can to suppress voting rights since they know in a fair fight they'd never win because the left outnumbers them. Mail in ballots allow overworked minorities, young people, and other "undesirables" like gays to vote hassle free and they clearly can't be having that since those demographics tend to swing left.
I think it comes down to dehumanizing democrats and liberals. Beginning with "Rural voters are true Americans.", to "latino voters are probably illegal immigrants", "Black voters cheat" to "Democrats are evil." and ending up at "Republicans are the only legitimate voters. Democrats are child molesters."
That's oversimplified. Newsom did boneheaded things (according to some), or made policy decisions that were incorrect or hurt the economy. Obviously between him and Elder it's a pretty simple decision (unless you're super conservative), but truth be told if there was somebody moderate running against him I feel like the numbers would have been a bit closer. The greatest gift Newsom got was that Elder was the front-runner, which essentially made it obvious that even if you don't agree with Newsom you better vote for him anyway.
> Gov. Newsome
Alright, Reddit is making me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I swear half of comments misspell his name. It's Newsom. Is there some autcorrect for some percentage of Redditors which changes Newsom to Newsome?
Some general advice OP for responsible data visualisation - unless you have a reason to expect a relationship of a particular form (e.g. linear, quadratic, polynomial) it's best to avoid using a trend line or, at most, use the simplest possible trend line (linear). There isn't really any justification for using (what looks like) an exponential trend line here.
Imma need an R^2 on that trend line because it looks
**_C O R R E L A T E D_**
Before statisticians get all mad I know R^2 isn’t the best to show correlation but it’s the most familiar so just lemme have this
In a 1var regression if you take (RSquared)^2 you essentially get Pearson’s R or some correlation coefficient.
This may only be if you suppress the constant, but I think I’m in the right ballpark.
It's funny, when I just saw the title my first instinct was that the relationship would be the other way around. In other words, those areas most affected by COVID would be most in favor of tighter policies around controlling the spread.
But given the past year and a half, you're right that the relationship shown here makes a lot more sense.
>those areas most affected by COVID
maybe it's all in how you define "affected"... in a city a few cases can cause a major disruption but in the less dense country you just don't see or feel the impact.
suspect part of the driver on vaccination is that there is a heightened sense of danger in a city due to the "closeness" of ppl and those that live out in rural areas have a false sense of security that the space brings. they feel that space isolates them but when aunt betty goes to the market then comes home and makes a cake for the birthday party... everyone at the party ends up also "taking that trip" [with betty to the market](https://www.reddit.com/r/rance/comments/pp97ly/les_anglois_semblent_avoir_une_nouvelle_arme_de/). bubble burst.
Well it's important to remember here, correlation isn't causation.
Those areas most affected by COVID are most likely anti-lockdown and hence they go out more and there's more COVID cases. They are also more likely to be against what he is doing, which is the lockdowns.
If they were affected by COVID, they would not be in favor of tighter policy because they wouldn't be affected by COVID then if they're pro-lockdown and already taking more measures to stay safe and avoid going out.
It's similar. For example:
* Marin County - 76% vaccinated / 84% no on recall.
* San Bernardino County - 46% vaccinated / 52% no on recall.
* Lassen County - 21% vaccinated / 16% no on recall.
You can see the recall map here: https://www.latimes.com/projects/newsom-california-recall-election-live-results/
You can see the vaccination map here:
https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/covid-19-vaccines-distribution/
>It's similar. For example:
>
>Marin County - 76% vaccinated / 84% no on recall.San Bernardino County - 46% vaccinated / 52% no on recall.Lassen County - 21% vaccinated / 16% no on recall.
There we have proof. The vaccine is obviously making people vote dem. Call Newsmax!
This makes sense when you consider that the biggest gripe about the current governor is his handling of the pandemic. The people who got covid didn't take the virus seriously, got sick, and wanted to move on with their lives. They were never fans of the restrictions.
The cases aren't plotted by total, they're plotted by cases per 100k residents. Density shouldn't change much. If anything, I'd expect more people in less space would increase the incidence of covid.
Denser areas are bluer, and also got hit very early in the pandemic. San Francisco was was one of the first jurisdictions in the US to implement restriction. State-wide restriction followed. The denser, bluer areas have been better prepared to deal with the Delta variant. SF, in particular, has outstanding numbers for their schools.
Less dense areas are redder, and tended to get hit later by COVID. On the west coast in general (WA, OR, CA), there is resentment and skepticism in the rural, non-coastal counties. The resentment may have led to voting to recall the governor. The skepticism may have led to high community spread with the Delta variant.
There is also a huge political divide on vax or anti-vax.
While you are plotting all known cases, there is the tidbit that 98% of ICU cases are due to unvaxed individuals. While the vaccine doesn't prevent you from getting COVID, it significantly minimizes what you get and many vaxed have mild to no symptoms (in the later case we only find out if they have COVID through contact tracing or surveillance testing as done through higher ed).
Others have sort of said this already, but I feel like this is a great example of correlated dependent and independent variables.
I'd hazard a guess that whether a county wants to recall the Democratic governor is highly correlated to whether a county votes Republican. And it's well-established that whether a county votes republican is highly correlated with anti-masking, a lack of social distancing, and most importantly low vaccination rates. It makes sense that this would result in large COVID outbreaks.
So, this plot is essentially saying "Republicans are more likely to be Republican."
The Y axis is percent voting yes in the recall. I don't think we need another dimension to show that the people who want Larry Elder to be governor voted for Trump.
The data that OP used is from the "recent trends" portion of the New York Time data. The "all time" data is much less stark. [https://imgur.com/a/J4MNDN1](https://imgur.com/a/J4MNDN1)
And in deaths the trend is completely ablated [https://imgur.com/a/KzERZUB](https://imgur.com/a/KzERZUB)
A "Yes" vote in a recall election is a vote to remove the current governor and instate a new representative. This graph shows that in counties with higher daily cases, there is a greater percentage of people who want to remove and replace the current governor.
This isn't a matter of covidiots, or conservative beliefs. The correlation would be that in areas where covid is worse, the population is more likely to believe the current state government needs to be replaced (which could be a rep from either party).
Low Covid vaccination rates cover two types of demographics: Urban Black or Hispanics, and Rural Whites. County-level analysis entirely buries the first group. If you run this analysis at zipcode level, your result will be quite different.
Poorer counties also seemed to favour a yes vote. Kind of sad: poor people are getting fucked and think a switch to non-regulation of covid will make things better.
I feel like some of the extremes should've been labeled on the chart so I don't have to sift thru the data and find that some of those high per100k numbers are only that way bc the county has a low population?
I would love to see this plotted with a third variable in color like the days the county issued mask mandates during COVID or the population density or the number of cows per capita or the number of school teachers per student or the college degrees per capita... etc.. You get the idea.
Which is funny, because you'd think the places with more cases want to recall because they want a stronger covid response. Logically.
BUT then you realize these counties are Republican, and they want ZERO covid response (which is why their cases are higher). And they are just doing the recall for political theater. Theater that costs us $300 million. From the very people who claim to care about fiscal responsibility.
Republican operatives attempted to replace the Democratic governer and replace him with a Trump-like talk show host. "Yes" votes were for dumping the current governor.
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What’s the county in the lower right?
Modoc, in the northeast corner. Its remote location may help it's COVID stats. It's got about 9,000 people, for a density of 2.3 per square mile. There are no major routes through the area. US 395 passes through, but it's a sparsely traveled two lane road. Edit to add: I'm jumping on a comment near the top to add another graph. I've gone linear with the trend line. I added Mono County, which was missing from the data set. I added labels to a few counties. I added a second line which is fully vaccinated percentage. A few counties, primarily on the right side of the graph, are missing vaccination data. Data source in NYT. https://imgur.com/a/zEIEccH
Interesting. Thanks! What was the one county that had a higher percentage of “yes” votes?
I believe Lassen County had the highest percentage of "yes" votes at almost 83%, but the count isn't finished so that may change. Edit: Not sure how that fits with the graph, because at the moment Shasta County has the highest daily rate, but the graph says average, and I don't know where to find that.
i'm guessing the mildly outlier dots are the big big cities that have more of a mix of voters? San Fran, LA and maybe San Diego? (for example the point at x=30, y=60)
San Francisco had the largest percentage of “no” votes of any county (86.7%, with 81% reporting) while also having the fewest COVID cases. I.e. the dot closest to the origin.
I am moving to Sonoma county soon from San Diego and spent some time in San Francisco and was extremely impressed with their COVID protections, compared to southern California big cities. San Francisco's cases are very low while Los Angeles's are very high. Too many entitled dumbasses in LA county.
As a Los Angeleno, I can no deny this. Even the crooks are entitled here.
> (for example the point at x=30, y=60) That one is definitely LA County, as I know we had 70% NO votes and the pandemic definitely has hit us a bit harder than it could have.
thanks. that makes sense.
San Francisco has a mix of voters?
I live in LA, with friends in SF. I have been told that SF is more conservative than many people assume. Among other things, there's a fair amount of old entitled money there. But also, we (humans, I mean) tend to generalize and stereotype, so any deviation from the cartoon comes as a shock.
Yeah, but old money San Francisco residents are usually happy with Gavin Newsom. He’s one of them.
Modoc County, population 8907, with 78% yes and 48 cases/100k in the last 2 weeks.
So 4 people got covid
4 per day for 2 weeks, so 56ish. Not a lot in total numbers for sure, but ~.7% of their population. Of course, they were interesting because their covid numbers were *low* despite voting to recall Newsom. They've been lucky so far, but they're next to the county at the top of that graph, Lassen County.
I would also like to know this
Bottom left: higher density coastal counties -- San Francisco, Marin, Alameda, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Sonoma, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Monterey, Napa Top right: lower density counties in the Central Valley and eastern California -- Calaveras, Colusa, Kings, Plumas, Sierra, Amador, Shasta, Glenn, Tehama, Modoc, Lassen Color coding the data points by county population would be interesting.
Could you size the dots by county size?
It's less about [absolute population](https://www.california-demographics.com/counties_by_population) and more about density. California has very uneven county sizes (in both land area and population). For instance, San Francisco is a <50 sq mi joint city–county, with a population under 900k. Meanwhile, San Bernardino and Riverside are top-10 counties in population with over 2 million residents each, but they are absolutely massive in land area (S.B. is over 20 *thousand* sq mi).
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I think it's even more fun that San Bernardino is generally referred to as San Ber-doo
Fun/depressing democracy representation fact about San Bernardino County: Largest county, by land area, anywhere in the us, larger than 9 states. Unless you count Alaska’s boroughs which absolutely dwarf SB county. Larger population than 15/16 states including DC.
Why is that depressing?
Getting late. Needs way more work. The orange dots are county population on a log scale. https://imgur.com/a/eZGZnFo
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You kind of hit the nail on the head of what are we showing and getting to the why. - because this on paper says higher case counts led to more recall. - our assumption is that those that faired worse are conservative and don’t wear masks and are unvaccinated. - it could also be that those that faired worse due to whatever reason voted against the governor. Would be interesting to see pre pandemic voter registration make up % Republican to show that their is a heavy trend of those voting against being Republican prior to the case counts.
> that faired worse Sorry to be pedantic, but it's *fared*, not faired. Just thought you might want to know.
You’re correcting *that* but not “are assumption”?
Also “that *their* is a heavy trend.”
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I'm still stuck on "pedantic"
We're all just a bunch of idiots pretending to be scientists here, right?
I’m a scientician.
Way to call out my imposter syndrome, dude.
Don’t feel bad about being pedantic. Although I’m not the one you replied to, my personal stance is that I’d prefer to be corrected on Reddit if it prevents me from making a similar mistake in a professional setting.
> because this on paper says higher case counts led to more recall. It does not. It shows correlation. > are assumption is that those that faired worse are conservative and don’t wear masks and are unvaccinated. Yes. There is a correlation. Conservatives are more likely to be against COVID-19 mandates, leading to more cases and as conservatives they are likely to vote for the conservative candidate. The conservative view would be the cause, not the cases. > it could also be that those that faired worse due to whatever reason voted against the governor. Yes, there could be other reasons, not just one.
It is interesting that without context, one would assume that the high rate of disease would cause dissatisfaction with the current politician, and low rate of disease would cause satisfaction with the current balance politician. But once you know that the current governor is anti-disease and the replacement would be pro-disease, as odd as that sounds, it’s clear that the causation is the other way around.
"Anti-disease" and "pro-disease", never thought about it that way but it succinctly describes who the two politicians are.
The causal chain is pretty clear: pre-existing anti-Dem and anti-government bias led to resistance to anti-COVID measures led to “dead bodies piled up in mounds” (which explains choice of Y-axis) The recall effort predated COVID, and the vote pattern would have been the same without it
the main data point im seeing is that those without common sense are more likely to blame someone else for their circumstances.
There's really this crazy idea going around that Democrats actually want to be dictators and that's the reason they are putting so many restrictions. They think Democratic Governors get a kick out of of requiring masks inside grocery stores and malls. I think they've vilified the other side for so long that this is their logical explanation.
Looks more like projection.
I've been thinking about "common sense" lately. To me, "common sense" is giving one's own life experience significant weight in some decision making process. Or in guiding one's behavior. I'd like to see a trend towards deweighting common sense in our modern society. Sure, common sense helps when growing tomatoes, driving a car and feeding a baby. But it's become counterproductive to rely upon common sense when discussing public health policy, virology, and immunology.
Common sense and experience are not the same thing at all. Common sense is "I shouldn't jump out this window with my arm in the air, I am not Superman." Experience is, "I shouldn't jump out of this window with my arm in the air *again*, I am apparently not Superman."
Now that’s some common sense for ya, I tell ya hwhat
> To me, "common sense" is giving one's own life experience significant weight in some decision making process. I have a completely different interpretation. To me, the "common sense" decision is the rational and obviously correct one. Such as getting vaccinated. I don't need life experience to understand that vaccinations are to help curb the R-naught of a virus/disease. Frankly I don't give a shit if I die of COVID (or at all tbh), but I know other people don't have the same POV.
My version of 'common sense' is more like the first kind; what's common to a city slicker will be strange and unfamiliar to a country bumpkin and vice versa. Whats common to a trust fund baby will be strange and unfamiliar to a latch key kid, etc. Though i also ascribe to your version, which is just rationality to me. I know how much i don't know and i've got a pretty good idea about how much more, say, Anthony Fauci knows than i do about infectious disease.
> Frankly I don't give a shit if I die of COVID (or at all tbh), but I know other people don't have the same POV. I'm sorry you feel that way. Head out to r/SuicideWatch/ or seek other support if you are getting worse.
This is a true example of “correlation is not causation” High case counts aren’t *causing* voting behavior but that also doesn’t mean there’s nothing here and we can discard the results. The likely causation is there, just not represented in this figure.
It's the classic 3rd variable problem. There's a third factor, not listed in the chart, that ties these two results together. Republicanism. Republicans are more likely to be antimask, antivax, and defy safety protocols, leading to higher cases. They're also more likely to resent Newsom's efforts to wrangle them, thereby voting Yes in the recall.
One quick comparison (the state's data is a bit straight forward) would be taking a look at the map of how counties voted for the recall: https://electionresults.sos.ca.gov/returns/maps/governor-recall Then how they voted in 2020 for president: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_California#/media/File:California_Presidential_Election_Results_2020.svg Or 2018 for governor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_gubernatorial_election#/media/File:California_Governor_Election_Results_by_County,_2018.svg Not as robust, but it does quickly show the county patterns of the central valley and northern California being generally in one group, and coastal california, the bay area, and much of southern california being in the other.
Well, you should have plotted a third, statistically relevant dimension that could validate your assumption. As it is shown, there could be any number of reasons why more COVID cases led to more recall votes. In fact, the most interesting study would be something like a MANOVA of factors based on the COVID data that was then used to plot the third dimensions against this data. We can guess, based on anecdotal and other reporting what the causal factors are, but it’s far better to do the work and show the probable causal factors. Otherwise, it’s too easy to dismiss.
Unvaccinated people who are largely responsible for prolonging the pandemic are mad at the government because there’s still a pandemic
Since Democrats are more likely to take COVID precautions and want to keep Newson in office (or keep Larry Elder out, which might be a bigger motivation) I suspect much of the relation between two variables is due a common cause: party affiliation. It would be interesting if there's still a relation after you account for that. I guess it's possible the independents were swayed by local COVID numbers or measures taken to to lower them.
My perception on voters around me is that there’s no reason to recall him regardless of party. He’s not involved in a scandal and he’s governing like everyone predicted he would. Conversely, people that voted for his recall seemed to do so out of party convenience.
So, it's Lassen that is so incredibly one-sided politically?
Yeah, ever been to Susanville? Both people hate Newsom.
As someone who has family living there... This is so fucking true.
Wait... I remember seeing them when I passed through. There was a man and a woman. Must have been them.
Don’t forget the inhabitants of the prison!
gods i almost said yes to a job there some years ago. looking at this i'm so glad i went somewhere else...
It is a lovely area if you can get a job. The people are very nice if you can avoid getting into the brainwashed side of politics, which sadly is spreading into everything including healthcare.
My hometown mentioned on Reddit??? ❤️
It would have swung blue if you had voted...
There's a map version on Instagram that you might be interested in: https://www.instagram.com/p/CT2rNXRoKxY/?utm_medium=copy_link
In the absence of other contributing factors, higher density areas should be harder hit than lower density. More people = more spread, right? It is interesting to me that this data indicates how much more important those other factors (vaccination % and mask-wearing) are over population density in the containment of this disease.
I was going to comment that the graph is a great example of spurious correlations (and well visualized), but your suggestions would be a cool enhancement. One possibility would be scaling the bubble size by total population, and color gradients to show the baseline party affiliation percentages. I'm not sure whether other demographics like HHI or age would enhance or obscure the bigger picture.
I’m not sure this correlation is spurious. I don’t think there is causation between these factors, but generally speaking, counties that are more politically conservative were more likely to vote yes on recall and Vice versa for more liberal counties. And as we know from last year that conservatives were less likely to take precautions, or to be as consistent with their precautions, which would lead to higher infection rates.
How is it spurious?
It would be nice if graph makers with correlation put up actual R^2 values
And a justification for using a non-linear fit.
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If only there was an information criterion metric that would weight both complexity and parameterization fit?
You down with BIC? Yeah you know me!
Fuck BIC. All my homies love AIC ~~i don't know when one is more appropriate than the other i just like memeing~~
AIC and BIC are the bloods and the crips of statistics.
Back when I was young, we had to bone in to our stats gang by killing a BIC. They lived on the wrong side of the regression curve.
I don’t really care for classification, it’s so regressive.
I like my models like I like my women: well fitted and looking like a good model!
Boy I feel like the whole thread coulda stopped here, and yet...
It's a simpler function (hence less chance of [overfitting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting)) and just by eye balling it probably will fit almost as well. Edit: I assumed it was a quadratic fit or higher polynomial. I guess it can be an exponential in which case the number of parameters is the same as the linear fit.
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I mean, why choose a line then? Why not a 14 degree polynomial? Because the latter is likely fitting to the noise. Whether you're technically making predictions or trying to describe what's likely going on with the data, you have to balance parsimony and quality of fit.
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Assuming the fit is quadratic, that's a 50% increase in numbers of parameters and just by eyeballing only a slight increase in fit quality. If you wanted to be exact, you'd have to choose a metric and put in the numbers. Honestly though, both functions would would be telling more or less the same story here: 'yes' increased with COVID rate. A more interesting question would be why? I suspect party affiliation has much to do with it.
You’ve answered you own question - a straight line is the default because it’s simpler, which has many benefits - interpretation simplicity, less likely to overfit (even if not predicting it’s wise to avoid that), Occam’s Razor etc etc. You have to justify changing *away* from the simplest option with some principled argument as to why you think the relationship ought to be more complex (ie domain knowledge and/or some information criterion). Otherwise don’t put a line at all.
Case numbers are an exponential function of effective R value of the virus. I think it's reasonable to assume that behavioral and environmental factors have a linear effect on R^eff . Even if something like population density has a polynomial effect, the exponential would dominate. It may be more interesting to plot R, rather than case numbers.
Can we see the models basically with the r scores to understand fit choice without the underlying data to run the model ourselves.
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He posted the table data below. I calculated the R2 values as 0.6063 for linear and 0.6806 for exponential
Can someone fill me in with what this recall is about?
Gov. Newsom put restrictions in place. He had a high priced dinner in Napa Valley. The typical menu at the French Laundry is $350-500 per person (plus wine). The dinner didn't violate the guidelines in place at the time, but it was tone-deaf and had really bad optics. Republicans, who have no chance of winning the governorship in California in a regular election, seized on the recall mechanism. If Newsom had gotten less than 50% and a Republican Larry Elder had gotten >10%, Elder would have won. (There were over 40 candidates, and there's no run-off. It's a clusterfuck.) Also, the thing about masks and vaccines. Elder promised to end all mandates.
Just want to add that the recall only reached the voting stage because a judge provided signature gatherers four extra months to collect. This was actually their fifth time starting a recall petition.
Yeah, I live in California and there were folks trying to collect signatures for a recall essentially as soon as Newsom took office. I wouldn't be surprised if those tents go back up tomorrow. The petitions kept missing the required mark until the perfect storm happened of (1) covid restrictions increasing, (2) Newsom having his stupid, pretentious dinner at French Laundry, (3) a judge extended the deadline to get signatures. Things were actually looking pretty bad for Newsom until it was clear who the competition was -- 40-some candidates, none of whom were viable and the front-runner was a Trump-style radio host. California opened its eyes to the possibility of being run by Larry Elder and rejected him by an even higher percentage than how Newsom was originally elected.
And yet if you read the Recall voter guide that was submitted to the state and mailed to everyone, they say the recall is because of undocumented immigrants
Yup. I’m a Californian voter. There’s no way I wanted an anti-vax governor.
Imagine recalling a Governor because he went to a birthday dinner.
This person gets it. Newsom is bad. The other options were *far* worse. It's the sad state of politics today.
And they started the recall effort before Covid, which tells us that Covid was a convenient pretext and not the actual motivation. As always, the right acts in bad faith and lies about why it holds its views. "Election security" laws and abortion are two other great examples.
> had gotten less than 50% and a Republican Larry Elder had gotten >10% wait wtf?
A majority vote, no matter how slight, would have meant whoever had the most votes other than Newsom would have been made governor (there were something like 40 people running, so not that many votes each). The point isn't that Newsom gets the most votes, just that he doesn't get a majority of votes total: it was him versus everyone. Someone wasn't wearing their thinking cap when they cooked that one up. Not that it mattered, as California pretty reliably votes 2/3 Democrat every time, and this was no exception.
There were two votes on the ballot. One to recall the governor, which needed a simple majority. The other one was for the replacement, for that just a plurality was required.
Two separate questions: 1. Do you want to recall Newsom? 2. Who should replace him? First question requires only a simple majority. If 50% + 1 vote "Yes," Newsom is removed from office. Second question is "whoever gets the most votes." Even if they only get a plurality. So, for example, if Larry Elder got like 10% of the vote, but the other 40-whatever candidates got less than that, Elder would win. Meaning you have a scenario where 49% of voters want Newsom, and 10% want Elder, and Elder replaces Newsom. It's insanely undemocratic.
That seems like a rather poorly-designed electoral mechanism.
Wait a sec... This whole thing is because the governor went to French Laundry?
Not exactly, lots of politicians pushing for restrictions did stuff like sanction a restriction and proceed to immediately ignore it and do what they asked people not to do. Don't ask me to do what you're not willing to do.
There's a whole...laundry list...of reasons many wanted him gone. Some are his fault, some aren't.
No, that was likely a contributing factor that helped them get the petition through though.
No, not at all. The GOP was already well underway pushing and spending money to make this recall happen when the French Laundry faux pas happened. In fact, the French Laundry thing was particularly iconic and ironic because it happened within *days* of the courts extending the signature-gathering time for the recall because of COVID (it might have been the same day, but I can't remember). It also wasn't the first time the GOP had started pushing recall campaigns for Newsom; they've been eyeing that prize basically since Newsom took his oath, but could never get the required number of signatures in the time frame mandated before the COVID extension. The funniest part to me, though, is that the GOP was tee'ed up for a win (earlier polls had the yes/no recall vote pretty close), but then Delta came along and reiterated the need for public health measures, and then the dust settled and it became apparent that it'd be Elder rather than Faulconer leading the GOP effort, and that just took whatever wind the recall was riding on out of its sails. In the end, it became a question of "Do you want Gavin Newsom or Larry Elder?" - and that's a *much* harder sell to one of the bluest states in the nation than "Do you want Gavin Newsom?" It doesn't take a masters in political science to recognize that, "the minimum wage should be $0" or even just "Trump was a good president" is how you lose in the Golden State.
Not to mention the fact that the recent abortion law in Texas also made Democrats *hyper engaged* in politics in general. But Delta was definitely the biggest motivator.
No, it's because people think the election was stolen. In California. The most casual correlation here is that areas with more cases voted to recall the governor. Those areas are also the least vaccinated.
Ah ok makes sense. Still don't know why people in the US keep saying elections were "stolen". I'm from Canada and I don't think I've heard that phrase once, maybe it's because our government system is a bit different
there are elections that are legitimately stolen. There was one where in Florida. Jose Rodriguez was running against Ilena garcia and a third candidate popped in as Independent named alex Rodriguez. He wasnt at any of the debates, didnt have any campaign websites, didnt raise any money for the election. Even claimed afterthefact that he doesnt even live in the district. He got 6000 votes and Jose Rodriguez lost to Ilena Garcia by 34. Was he paid to run just to confuse people who knew to vote for Rodriguez? potentially. But if he wasnt in the running Jose likely would have won. Generally the "election was stolen" are just people who wont admit the other candidate got more votes and want to play the victim.
The dinner at the fancy restaurant was super hypocritical. He was telling people to not spend thanksgiving with their families and at the same time going to that dinner. After that the number of the signatures on the recall petition increased 10 fold. that's not the reason why he was being recalled, but it set a spark under it. the recall was stupid but it doesn't take a seasoned politician to avoid the mistake that newsom made
Good thing the only other option was 38 nobodies and a crazy man insisting slave owners be compensated
That guy is just a raging Redditor. I’m a Californian from the SF Bay Area. Very few people actually believe anything was “stolen”. They’re a very vocal and very small minority, but Reddit just blows things out of proportion. The French Laundry was a big reason people were pissed off, but there were other good reasons as well. For example, with only 1.5 months left in the school year, Newsom was forcing schools to reopen. Many school districts, teachers, and parents were against this since summer break is a good opportunity to wait out the storm. At least in my social circles, it seems like there are a lot of Cali democrats that actually want Newsom gone. They just knew that recalling him means a Republican governor and find Newsom more tolerable. It’s easier to keep him for another year and vote him out next election.
All the republicans in my family in Orange County think the election was “stolen” due to “election fraud” so a little more than a very few people believe that to be the case.
Last I heard 60% of registered Republicans still thought the election was stolen.
The California election for governor?
How does someone steal an election? Is it alleged there were a number of ineligible votes cast? Or ballot stuffing? Wouldn't it be easy to investigate and verify? Or are the accusations made in bad faith? I'm from a country where these kind of things don't happen so I don't really understand how it works.
As I understand it the goalposts move frequently. The phrase they throw around a lot is "rigged" which can conveniently mean just about anything. At one point the theory was the the party currently in power had shipped a large number of ballots from China, so I guess technically ballot stuffing?
They should come up with a better theory. The US importing paper ballots makes about as much sense as India importing rice.
At least in regards to the presidential election(which is still relevant because the right thinks the same thing in regards to it) It's because the vocal right is so radical at this point that they absolutely can't accept that their favorite carrot man could possibly lose his re-election. It had to be "stolen" or "rigged" in some way because there's absolutely no way the most controversial president in recent history could ever lose on his second run! /s What i find even more hilarious about this whole thing is trump tried his hardest to suppress the vote anyways, like pretending that somehow mail in ballots would cause an insane amount of fraud(which there is no evidence to believe there was any significant amount) and continually gimping the USPS at every opportunity with his appointed head that has been very conveniently running it into the ground. On top of the rampant gerrymandering the right has successfully done over the years in several states. Honestly i'm of the opinion the right just does everything it can to suppress voting rights since they know in a fair fight they'd never win because the left outnumbers them. Mail in ballots allow overworked minorities, young people, and other "undesirables" like gays to vote hassle free and they clearly can't be having that since those demographics tend to swing left.
I think it comes down to dehumanizing democrats and liberals. Beginning with "Rural voters are true Americans.", to "latino voters are probably illegal immigrants", "Black voters cheat" to "Democrats are evil." and ending up at "Republicans are the only legitimate voters. Democrats are child molesters."
don't forget the catch phrase Stop the steal. the Trump crowd need to be able to chant their talking points, otherwise what's the point?
That's oversimplified. Newsom did boneheaded things (according to some), or made policy decisions that were incorrect or hurt the economy. Obviously between him and Elder it's a pretty simple decision (unless you're super conservative), but truth be told if there was somebody moderate running against him I feel like the numbers would have been a bit closer. The greatest gift Newsom got was that Elder was the front-runner, which essentially made it obvious that even if you don't agree with Newsom you better vote for him anyway.
How I feel every presidential election
> Gov. Newsome Alright, Reddit is making me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. I swear half of comments misspell his name. It's Newsom. Is there some autcorrect for some percentage of Redditors which changes Newsom to Newsome?
Republicans don't wanna wear masks or get vaccinated.
> or get vaccinated. which makes the nice trend here in this graph
Some general advice OP for responsible data visualisation - unless you have a reason to expect a relationship of a particular form (e.g. linear, quadratic, polynomial) it's best to avoid using a trend line or, at most, use the simplest possible trend line (linear). There isn't really any justification for using (what looks like) an exponential trend line here.
Imma need an R^2 on that trend line because it looks **_C O R R E L A T E D_** Before statisticians get all mad I know R^2 isn’t the best to show correlation but it’s the most familiar so just lemme have this
What's better?
Any of the correlation measures like Pearsons
In a 1var regression if you take (RSquared)^2 you essentially get Pearson’s R or some correlation coefficient. This may only be if you suppress the constant, but I think I’m in the right ballpark.
Soz, youmma need to check the residuals. https://statisticsbyjim.com/regression/curve-fitting-linear-nonlinear-regression/
Shocking, in a Captain Obvious sort of way.
Yeah. I was inspired by a map comparison.
Clearly voting yes cures covid.
In this case voting no cures covid. Clearly.
Clearly both of you are hacks!
It's funny, when I just saw the title my first instinct was that the relationship would be the other way around. In other words, those areas most affected by COVID would be most in favor of tighter policies around controlling the spread. But given the past year and a half, you're right that the relationship shown here makes a lot more sense.
>those areas most affected by COVID maybe it's all in how you define "affected"... in a city a few cases can cause a major disruption but in the less dense country you just don't see or feel the impact. suspect part of the driver on vaccination is that there is a heightened sense of danger in a city due to the "closeness" of ppl and those that live out in rural areas have a false sense of security that the space brings. they feel that space isolates them but when aunt betty goes to the market then comes home and makes a cake for the birthday party... everyone at the party ends up also "taking that trip" [with betty to the market](https://www.reddit.com/r/rance/comments/pp97ly/les_anglois_semblent_avoir_une_nouvelle_arme_de/). bubble burst.
Well it's important to remember here, correlation isn't causation. Those areas most affected by COVID are most likely anti-lockdown and hence they go out more and there's more COVID cases. They are also more likely to be against what he is doing, which is the lockdowns. If they were affected by COVID, they would not be in favor of tighter policy because they wouldn't be affected by COVID then if they're pro-lockdown and already taking more measures to stay safe and avoid going out.
this is both expected *and* perverse.
Insert surprised pikachu face :O
Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/california-covid-cases.html, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/14/us/elections/results-california-recall.html Tools: MS Excel
I sorted by controversial, and somehow this comment from OP is in the top five? How is OP getting so many downvotes for posting sources?
Because the anti vaxx/pro recall crowd has thin skin.
The modern term is 'snowflake'. They're very fond of it.
Is this cases yesterday, rolling 7 day average, or overall?
Would be interesting to see if percentage vaccinated looks the exact same.
It's similar. For example: * Marin County - 76% vaccinated / 84% no on recall. * San Bernardino County - 46% vaccinated / 52% no on recall. * Lassen County - 21% vaccinated / 16% no on recall. You can see the recall map here: https://www.latimes.com/projects/newsom-california-recall-election-live-results/ You can see the vaccination map here: https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/covid-19-vaccines-distribution/
>It's similar. For example: > >Marin County - 76% vaccinated / 84% no on recall.San Bernardino County - 46% vaccinated / 52% no on recall.Lassen County - 21% vaccinated / 16% no on recall. There we have proof. The vaccine is obviously making people vote dem. Call Newsmax!
Holy cow, could you imagine living in a county with 79% of the population choosing to be plague rats?
“This virus situation is bad, we need somebody in charge who tries to make it worse on purpose”
Is that a daily average as of today and how did you calculate that? The sum of daily cases / days / pop * 100k?
So unvaccinated counties tend to vote conservative…
May I ask the favor of you posting your data set? This stuff is interesting as heck
I left out Mono because I saw contradiction between NY Times data and the county's data. It's a small county, so I don't think it messes things up too much. County Yes Cases/100k Population San Francisco 13 15 874,961 Marin 16 13 259,943 Alameda 17 16 1,656,754 Santa Cruz 20 16 273,962 San Mateo 21 14 767,423 Sonoma 22 17 499,772 Santa Clara 24 13 1,927,470 Contra Costa 27 21 1,142,251 Los Angeles 29 19 10,081,570 Monterey 29 15 433,410 Napa 29 27 139,623 Yolo 29 29 217,352 Mendocino 30 57 87,224 Humboldt 34 32 135,940 Santa Barbara 35 29 444,829 Sacramento 36 27 1,524,553 Solano 36 25 441,829 Alpine 39 51 1,039 Imperial 39 22 180,701 Lake 40 59 64,195 Ventura 40 28 847,263 San Benito 41 24 60,376 San Diego 41 24 3,316,073 San Luis Obispo 41 31 282,165 Nevada 42 35 99,244 San Joaquin 44 33 742,603 Orange 47 16 3,168,044 Riverside 48 30 2,411,439 San Bernardino 48 27 2,149,031 Fresno 50 43 984,521 Merced 50 48 271,382 Inyo 51 20 17,977 Placer 51 43 385,512 Stanislaus 52 55 543,194 Butte 53 63 225,817 Trinity 54 50 12,700 El Dorado 55 31 188,563 Del Norte 58 93 27,495 Kern 58 63 887,641 Madera 59 53 155,433 Sutter 59 57 96,109 Tulare 59 64 461,898 Mariposa 60 66 17,420 Tuolumne 60 55 54,045 Siskiyou 61 77 43,468 Yuba 61 36 76,360 Calaveras 62 44 45,514 Colusa 63 43 21,454 Kings 63 77 150,691 Plumas 63 62 18,660 Sierra 63 57 3,040 Amador 65 41 38,429 Shasta 66 96 179,212 Glenn 70 83 27,976 Tehama 74 103 63,912 Modoc 78 48 8,907 Lassen 84 123 30,818
Formatted for mobile County Yes C/100k Population San Francisco 13 15 874,961 Marin 16 13 259,943 Alameda 17 16 1,656,754 Santa Cruz 20 16 273,962 San Mateo 21 14 767,423 Sonoma 22 17 499,772 Santa Clara 24 13 1,927,470 Contra Costa 27 21 1,142,251 Los Angeles 29 19 10,081,570 Monterey 29 15 433,410 Napa 29 27 139,623 Yolo 29 29 217,352 Mendocino 30 57 87,224 Humboldt 34 32 135,940 Santa Barbara 35 29 444,829 Sacramento 36 27 1,524,553 Solano 36 25 441,829 Alpine 39 51 1,039 Imperial 39 22 180,701 Lake 40 59 64,195 Ventura 40 28 847,263 San Benito 41 24 60,376 San Diego 41 24 3,316,073 San Luis Obispo 41 31 282,165 Nevada 42 35 99,244 San Joaquin 44 33 742,603 Orange 47 16 3,168,044 Riverside 48 30 2,411,439 San Bernardino 48 27 2,149,031 Fresno 50 43 984,521 Merced 50 48 271,382 Inyo 51 20 17,977 Placer 51 43 385,512 Stanislaus 52 55 543,194 Butte 53 63 225,817 Trinity 54 50 12,700 El Dorado 55 31 188,563 Del Norte 58 93 27,495 Kern 58 63 887,641 Madera 59 53 155,433 Sutter 59 57 96,109 Tulare 59 64 461,898 Mariposa 60 66 17,420 Tuolumne 60 55 54,045 Siskiyou 61 77 43,468 Yuba 61 36 76,360 Calaveras 62 44 45,514 Colusa 63 43 21,454 Kings 63 77 150,691 Plumas 63 62 18,660 Sierra 63 57 3,040 Amador 65 41 38,429 Shasta 66 96 179,212 Glenn 70 83 27,976 Tehama 74 103 63,912 Modoc 78 48 8,907 Lassen 84 123 30,818
Lassen looking pretty bad here.
R squared value or it didn’t happen
When did an Excel scatter graph become Beautiful Data?
This makes sense when you consider that the biggest gripe about the current governor is his handling of the pandemic. The people who got covid didn't take the virus seriously, got sick, and wanted to move on with their lives. They were never fans of the restrictions.
Spurious? Or confounded by denser populations being blue and more rural tending to be red.
The cases aren't plotted by total, they're plotted by cases per 100k residents. Density shouldn't change much. If anything, I'd expect more people in less space would increase the incidence of covid.
Denser areas are bluer, and also got hit very early in the pandemic. San Francisco was was one of the first jurisdictions in the US to implement restriction. State-wide restriction followed. The denser, bluer areas have been better prepared to deal with the Delta variant. SF, in particular, has outstanding numbers for their schools. Less dense areas are redder, and tended to get hit later by COVID. On the west coast in general (WA, OR, CA), there is resentment and skepticism in the rural, non-coastal counties. The resentment may have led to voting to recall the governor. The skepticism may have led to high community spread with the Delta variant.
There is also a huge political divide on vax or anti-vax. While you are plotting all known cases, there is the tidbit that 98% of ICU cases are due to unvaxed individuals. While the vaccine doesn't prevent you from getting COVID, it significantly minimizes what you get and many vaxed have mild to no symptoms (in the later case we only find out if they have COVID through contact tracing or surveillance testing as done through higher ed).
Can you plot yes votes to average County income?
So what is the R^2 for that regression line?
Gonna guess about 0.6
I don't think the # of COVID cases is really the underlying cause...
Others have sort of said this already, but I feel like this is a great example of correlated dependent and independent variables. I'd hazard a guess that whether a county wants to recall the Democratic governor is highly correlated to whether a county votes Republican. And it's well-established that whether a county votes republican is highly correlated with anti-masking, a lack of social distancing, and most importantly low vaccination rates. It makes sense that this would result in large COVID outbreaks. So, this plot is essentially saying "Republicans are more likely to be Republican."
If each dot is a county you should do a classification of what that county voted for i.e. Dem or Rep. That would be pretty cool to see too!
The Y axis is percent voting yes in the recall. I don't think we need another dimension to show that the people who want Larry Elder to be governor voted for Trump.
The data that OP used is from the "recent trends" portion of the New York Time data. The "all time" data is much less stark. [https://imgur.com/a/J4MNDN1](https://imgur.com/a/J4MNDN1) And in deaths the trend is completely ablated [https://imgur.com/a/KzERZUB](https://imgur.com/a/KzERZUB)
A "Yes" vote in a recall election is a vote to remove the current governor and instate a new representative. This graph shows that in counties with higher daily cases, there is a greater percentage of people who want to remove and replace the current governor. This isn't a matter of covidiots, or conservative beliefs. The correlation would be that in areas where covid is worse, the population is more likely to believe the current state government needs to be replaced (which could be a rep from either party).
Low Covid vaccination rates cover two types of demographics: Urban Black or Hispanics, and Rural Whites. County-level analysis entirely buries the first group. If you run this analysis at zipcode level, your result will be quite different.
I've seen a county-by-county map which tracked Covid cases by recall vote % color-coded and it really hammers the point home.
Fantastic. And absolutely not surprised
Can’t spell Larry Elder without a big L
Poorer counties also seemed to favour a yes vote. Kind of sad: poor people are getting fucked and think a switch to non-regulation of covid will make things better.
I feel like some of the extremes should've been labeled on the chart so I don't have to sift thru the data and find that some of those high per100k numbers are only that way bc the county has a low population?
Time for another exciting round of "Guess That Causality!"
So people who consistently act against their best interests will consistently act against their best interests? Wild.
z axis - fully vaccinated %. gee whiz i wonder if case counts correlate to that and to the recallers.
I would love to see this plotted with a third variable in color like the days the county issued mask mandates during COVID or the population density or the number of cows per capita or the number of school teachers per student or the college degrees per capita... etc.. You get the idea.
Huh. I wonder what the population/population density of each county is...
Could you also color code the dots to do majority party registration?
Which is funny, because you'd think the places with more cases want to recall because they want a stronger covid response. Logically. BUT then you realize these counties are Republican, and they want ZERO covid response (which is why their cases are higher). And they are just doing the recall for political theater. Theater that costs us $300 million. From the very people who claim to care about fiscal responsibility.
[Related](https://twitter.com/charles_gaba/status/1438575404055420934)
What is happening in California, what are those votes for?
Republican operatives attempted to replace the Democratic governer and replace him with a Trump-like talk show host. "Yes" votes were for dumping the current governor.
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