The Centers for Disease Control and other health authorities have urged Americans to avoid all non-essential travel to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But new research, which analyzed data from 15 million GPS smartphone coordinates, indicates that people in counties that voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election have tended to socially distance less than those in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton.
The findings have been published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behavior.
“Actually, I stumbled upon the topic and the project. While freaking out about COVID-19 in March, 2020, I saw an article proposing the use of GPS cellphone data to track social distancing. After getting my hands on this data, I started to explore which variables at the U.S. county level were most closely linked to differences in social distancing,” said study author Anton Gollwitzer, a PhD candidate at Yale University.
Gollwitzer and his colleagues found a correlation between county-level partisanship and social distancing after using smartphone location coordinates to analyzed people’s movements in 3,025 U.S. counties between March 9 and May 29, 2020. The location data was obtained from Unacast, a company that collects mobility data from adults who have provided their consent.
The more a county favored Trump over Clinton in the 2016 election, the less that county exhibited social distancing. This was true even after controlling for variables such as commute time, median income, population density, number of coronavirus cases per capita, and specific state-wide COVID-19 policies.
People in counties that voted for Trump in 2016 showed a 24% drop in regular activity, compared to a 38% drop in activity in counties that voted for Clinton.
“The political orientation of U.S. counties was the biggest predictor of social distancing in that Trump voting counties distanced a lot less. It wasn’t as if I was trying to find what we found — the data told the story, not me,” Gollwitzer told PsyPost.
The researchers also expected that the partisan gap in social distancing would decrease as the pandemic progressed. But the opposite was true. The partisan gap strengthened over time.
Stay-at-home orders also resulted in even greater partisan gaps rather than reducing them. “This difference may be driven by more Republican-leaning counties ignoring local stay-at-home orders in light of national messaging from right-wing media and federal leaders; or, Republicans may simply hold a greater distrust of government than Democrats,” the researchers wrote in their study.
Gollwitzer and his colleagues also found that partisan cable news viewership was associated with social distancing behavior. US counties that consumed more news from Republican-leaning Fox News than Democratic-leaning MSNBC and CNN tended to exhibit less social distancing.
“There are very real partisan differences in social distancing (and how seriously people are taking COVID-19). I think many of us may have intuited this already, but having empirical evidence to support this idea is really important in this ‘post-truth’ environment,” Gollwitzer said.
Finally, using a combination of mathematical models, the researchers found that partisan differences in social distancing were associated with subsequent infection and fatality growth rates. According to these models, reduced social distancing in pro-Trump counties was associated with a higher subsequent daily infection growth rate than average.
“Reduced physical distancing in counties was linked to a subsequent increase in COVID-19 infection and fatality growth rates roughly 17–23 and 25–31 days later, respectively,” the researchers wrote in their study.
“Usually when there is societal trauma people band together and abandon partisan values. But, we find the opposite here. It seems that partisanship has become so intense (or politicians so personally incentivized) that even a huge public health crisis — COVID-19 — was approached in a partisan light,” Gollwitzer said.
“Let’s be blunt here. Donald Trump tried to use the crisis for political gain and to heighten polarization and divisiveness. In turn, a greater number of his supporters got sick than would have been expected. Some even died. All in all, it’s really quite disturbing and a pretty extreme example of failed leadership.”
The results are in line with another study that examined the relationship between partisanship and behavior during a public emergency. That study, which also utilized GPS location data, found that residents of Florida who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were less likely than those who voted for Hillary Clinton to have evacuated before Hurricane Irma made landfall.
But the new study — like all research — includes some caveats. “For one, our work was not causal, and was restricted to the county level. Said another way, we showed that political orientation is associated with less social distancing, not per se that political orientation causes differences in social distancing. Though, we did control for a ton of variables that might explain the link (e.g., COVID infections per capita, income, density, racial and age demographics),” Gollwitzer explained.
“Also, we don’t address the question of how we can attenuate the observed differences in social distancing. That is, how do we get Republicans to be more concerned with COVID-19 and engage in greater social distancing? I think this is the million dollar question.”
The study, “Partisan differences in physical distancing are linked to health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic“, was authored by Anton Gollwitzer, Cameron Martel, William J. Brady, Philip Pärnamets, Isaac G. Freedman, Eric D. Knowles, and Jay J. Van Bavel.
(Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
