Morning Report: How We Found That Republicans Died At Higher Rates Than Dems

By Voice of San Diego, the Voice of San Diego

January 31, 2023

On Monday, reporters Will Huntsberry and Jesse Marx published a story about Republicans dying at significantly higher rates than Democrats during the post-vaccine era.

Now, in a new piece, Huntsberry lays out how they did it.

“I don’t think I ever cried, but I came close,” Huntsberry writes.

Voice reporters logged roughly 6,400 Covid death certificates over the course of many months. The challenge was to then match those death certificates to San Diego County’s voter roll, which contains roughly 1.9 million rows of data.

Finding exact matches of name and birthdate was easy enough. But Huntsberry and Marx knew they also needed to look for near matches in order to account for errors in data entry in the Covid and voter records.

They were forced to learn a programming language called R, in order to search for those near matches. After many wild shouts of anger and triumph, many computer crashes and endless Youtube tutorials, they eventually did it.

Read how they did it here.

Border Report: Cross-Border Projects to Watch

After a short hiatus, Voice of San Diego contributor Sandra Dibble is back with a roundup of U.S.-Mexico border projects she’s keeping an eye on this year. (If you’re not already subscribed to her bi-weekly border roundup, you can do that here.)

In the latest Border Report, Dibble writes that in the decades she has covered the border region, she has seen cross-border projects come and go. Right now, she’s especially interested in four projects that promise to move the regions forward by addressing border sewage, travel and more.

But as Dibble writes, “binational collaboration can be a difficult, slow-moving process with many moving parts. So many factors are at play: changing political administrations, shifting economic realities, lawsuits by angry investors.” She checks in on where each project stands.

Read the Border Report here.

In Other News

• Last year, University of California graduate student workers won wage increases after going on a 40-day strike. Now, the student workers are learning that their raises come with a cost – they will have to repay all the money they earned while they were on strike. (KPBS)
• Protesters held several demonstrations across the county late last week and through the weekend in response to the two recent deaths of two men at the hands of law enforcement – Tyre Nichols in Memphis and Keenan Anderson in Los Angeles. (Union-Tribune)
• A building at Cal State San Marcos will be renamed because of its connection to the late Sen. William Craven, the founder of the university, who has been criticized for his remarks about immigrants and the Hispanic community. (NBC 7)
• A red panda at the San Diego Zoo escaped her enclosure for six hours on Monday by climbing up a tree near her habitat. The red panda, named Adira, was safely lured back into her enclosure by zoo employees. (Union-Tribune)###a>

The Morning Report was written by Will Huntsberry and Tigist Layne. It was edited by Andrea Lopez-Villafaña.

Voice of San Diego is a nonprofit news organization supported by our members. We reveal why things are the way they are and expose facts that people in power might not want out there and explain complex local public policy issues so you can be engaged and make good decisions. Sign up for our newsletters at voiceofsandiego.org/newsletters/.