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by Valgrim 1468 days ago
Demagoguery implies an appeal to emotion rather than reason. The argument presented in this articles stems from reason and is an analysis of real, verifiable data, so I'd say no.
2 comments

good on you to look more carefully.. I would say that the emotion here is the health outcome.. by saying "super bad health outcome" == "that group over there" it appeals to emotions, because just about any whole person would care about health outcomes for others, and any literate person would very likely care about health outcome for themselves.

with the emotion being the health outcome response, I would tend towards Yes, demagogue.

In the case of the clickbait-ish title I would agree, but if the actual claim is an accurate representation of the data[0] how is one supposed to phrase that idea in a way that _wouldn't_ be considered demagoguery under this broad of a definition?

[0] I don't currently have time to verify this myself.

not a specialist but I have worked alongside specialists in public policy and public health, at scale. I think the first step is that you need to classify the parts of the population a few ways.. income, language group, age, relationships in close contact / living quarters; next layer is something about education, vocation, and remove or focus on real health outliers.. special needs, dangerous jobs, any circumstantial effects in their area that affect many people.

Any real studies in health sciences rely on statistics, so the treatment of the stats has to be defensible. That specifically is where they lose me, but that is how it is done.

I do not subscribe to the partisan politics world-view, in many, many ways.. so I was motivated to disparage the idea that this study is adequate to learn by the reader. I also am not going to take the time to really read this one. hth

The article tries to come to the conclusion that correlation equals causation. The title reads "A growing gap in premature deaths along party lines underscores the collision of politics and public health" which implies politics causes premature deaths. In reality it's more likely that the average Republican voter skews both lower income and rural which is the true causation of deaths.
> In reality it's more likely that the average Republican voter skews both lower income and rural which is the true causation of deaths.

The author's based their analysis on data; is there data for your claim? There is plenty of poverty in cities.

EDIT: Quoting another commenter who quoted the OP: "[r]egardless of whether we looked at urban or rural areas, people living in areas with Republican political preferences were more likely to die prematurely than those in areas with Democratic political preferences"

Unless you're arguing that the typical Republican voter is skewing ruraler and poorer over time such a theory doesn't explain why the gap is growing.
I think that's a valid argument to be made. Stats have shown the Republican party has become more blue collar over time [1] and that white collar workers are trending left over time [2]. This would explain why the gap is growing: blue collar workers make less and sacrifice more of their health on the job than white collar workers. Blue collar workers also generally don't live in cities, because factories and industry aren't located in cities.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/gop-rapidly-...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/11/democrat-...