As human beings, most of us aren’t exactly comfortable with the topic of death. Understandably so, since being born carries with it a 100 percent mortality rate.

That’s probably why human cultures across the globe and throughout history have created incarnations of our own demise, personifications of death itself.

The ancient Greeks had Thanatos, who guided people to the underworld. In India, there’s the Hindu god Yama, who would judge the dead and decide if they should be banished to one of the 21 hells. Here in America, we tend to favor the European figure that originated during the 14th Century’s Black Plague, the Grim Reaper.

Regardless of the details, these figures tend to help us manage our existential dread.

It’s unusual then, to find an organization that actually seems to champion death’s agenda. A group of people who regularly and demonstrably make it their declared goal to help death get as many customers as they can. And yet that’s the work the Republican Party has done for decades, and still proudly carries on.

Some recent scientific evidence makes this case pretty clearly.

A study by the Harvard Institute of Public Health, published in the journal Lancet, analyzed data on COVID-19 mortality rates in every congressional district from April 2021 to March 2022. Researchers noted congresspersons’ overall voting record, how they voted on four COVID relief bills, and whether the state’s governor’s office and legislature were controlled by one party.

The research discovered that the more conservative the voting record of the state’s federal and local representatives, the higher the age-adjusted mortality rates, even after accounting for racial, education and income factors. COVID death rates proved to be a full 11 percent higher in states with Republican-controlled governments, and 26 percent higher in areas where voters leaned conservative.

A Washington Post analysis of CDC data from April 2020 through summer 2022 revealed how COVID death rates shifter. Early in the pandemic, communities of color, especially black Americans, suffered the highest death tolls. But by autumn 2021 the pattern shifted and white Americans, the core of the Republican Party’s base, were dying at higher rates than other groups.

These public health patterns are also measurable here in San Diego County.

Local news organization Voice of San Diego examined ~6,400 death certificates over many months. They then matched those death certificates to San Diego County’s voter roll, about 1.9 million voters. Voice of San Diego’s study actually matched the names of those who died to their political party affiliation.

The data show that Republicans were 39 percent more likely to die with COVID during year two of the pandemic, even after adjusting for the fact they tend to be older than Democrats. Independent voters, those with no party affiliation, were also 30 percent more likely to die than Democrats during the same period.

So more Republicans in San Diego died in year two of the pandemic, even though for every Republican in the county there are roughly 1.5 Democrats. So the rate of death was much worse for Republicans. Those local death rates roughly align with vaccination rates. In September 2021, 92 percent of Democrats reported being vaccinated, compared to just 56 percent of Republicans.

A former county supervisor, Republican Greg Cox, reacted to these data by saying he was disturbed, but not surprised. “Does it surprise me?” said Cox, “Not really. I would assume it was because of the influence of some people in the Republican Party…to convince people not to get vaccinated.”

Death must appreciate Republican politicians offering him so many of their voters. But the Republican boosterism of death is not confined to COVID issues.

The Party’s wholesale attack on making healthcare more accessible to Americans also contributes to increases in avoidable deaths.

Prior to establishment of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the Institute of Medicine found that at 18,000 Americans were dying each year because they did not have health insurance. And yet since the Affordable Care Act’s inception, repealing the healthcare law has been a stated goal of the Republican Party, something that Trump twice campaigned on.

A study on the effect of state government policy on mortality by a University of Washington political scientist, published in PLOS One in October 2022, revealed a dramatic difference in death rates depending on if a state enacts Democratic or Republican policies.

The report concludes that if all states implemented liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, criminal justice, health and welfare, labor, economic and tobacco taxes, 170,000 lives would have been saved in 2019. Conversely, if states had gone with the conservative versions of those same polices, an additional 217, 000 death would have occurred that year. Or, as the study puts it, “the equivalent of a 600-passenger airplane crashing every day of the year.”

Of course, those numbers would likely be worse now, given Republicans’ attacks on American women’s reproductive healthcare access. As American women increasingly lose access to legal abortion services, university researchers estimate that maternal deaths could increase by up to 25 to 30 percent. Americans already live shorter lives than people in comparable nations, in part because it is the worst place among high-income countries to give birth.

But Republicans aren’t just advocating policies to advance death’s agenda, they’re also waiting for death to sort out their internal organizational struggles. In a recent book by Mark Leibovich, he quotes a former Republican representative, who succinctly summarized the Party’s plan to confront with the challenges it faces having to deal with Donald Trump for another election cycle. Said the Republican politician, “We’re just waiting for him to die.”

Given Republican politicians’ enthusiasm for death, it wouldn’t be surprising to begin to see the Party use him as a figurehead, or sort of a mascot.

Maybe in the next campaign cycle, GOP TV ads can end with the tagline from a hooded, skeletal entity, brandishing a scythe, as he hisses, “I’m the Grim Reaper, and I approved this message.”

– Sean Quintal writes on behalf of the La Mesa Foothills Democratic Club.