Conservatives Are Dying at Higher Rates Than Liberals

[applegrove]

Conservatives Are Dying at Higher Rates Than Liberals

June 19, 2026 at 6:53 am EDT By Taegan Goddard 120 Comments

https://politicalwire.com/2026/06/19/conservatives-are-dying-at-higher-rates-than-liberals/

“Your politics could be making you ill, and conservatives are dying at significantly higher rates than liberals, according to a recent study in Nature,” Fast Company reports.

“Over the past decade, a health gap has emerged in the United States. While extensive research has examined how factors like income and education shape health outcomes, political ideology has largely been overlooked—until now.”

[dave99]

1. YEA YEA YEA !!

[Ocelot II]

2. Direct link to the study:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9

[2naSalit]

3. Well...

There's a bright note on an all too gloomy day.

[lostnfound]

4. Y'all please don't cheer this. It's education, income, stress, plus misinformation

College educated people more likely to be liberal AND more likely to have knowledge they need to encourage healthy lifestyle
Liberals living in California and New York have access to medical care that you can’t find in rural areas or in parts of the Deep South
Exposure to hazardous working conditions and/or environmental toxins are another difference — coal miners, petroleum workers.

Then there’s the anti-vax thing, and the other medical claims being made.

[DBoon]

12. Does this explain the widening difference since 2010?

from the original Nature article:

By the 2020s, conservatives were dying at significantly higher rates than liberals, with the gap concentrated in internal causes (for example, heart disease, cancer and stroke). The divide since 2020 is substantial: while only 0.2% of ‘very liberal’ respondents died of internal causes between 2020 and 2022, the probability for people who identified as ‘very conservative’ was 1.14 percentage points higher (P = 0.021; 95% confidence interval (CI), (0.18, 2.11)). This gap is not limited to deaths from COVID-19 and is not reducible to demographic or geographic differences between the groups, nor is it a pure function of ageing: previous cohorts’ death patterns in older data did not show a similar correlation between health and ideology before 2010.

We suggest that these growing health gaps are consistent with a mechanism of politically rooted changes in engagement with the health system. Using a large public opinion survey, we find that people on the right, particularly Trump voters and Republicans, express less trust in their personal doctor and are less willing to seek care for non-COVID-19-related health problems18,19. We also find that people on the right with chronic illnesses are more sceptical than people on the left that medicines to treat those illnesses are safe and effective. This political divide in consumption of care may sustain or deepen the health divide that has emerged in recent decades. However, both these findings and those on health outcomes are purely descriptive; more work is needed to uncover causal relationships.

[Initech]

5. Least shocking news of the day!

[mountain grammy]

6. Best thing I've heard all day

[BootinUp]

7. Creating their own reality has limitations. Nt

[roamer65]

8. ..

[rzemanfl]

9. I'd be happy to lend a hand.

What should I say to them?

[BWdem4life]

18. lol

Willful ignorance will always prevail over reason.

[flvegan]

10. Oh no!

Anyway.

[dickthegrouch]

11. Color me surprised (not!) /nt

[madinmaryland]

13. Hate has been shown to shorten life.

[C_U_L8R]

14. Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

The dopes need to read their Darwin and lay off the right wing media diet.

[malaise]

15. Yes... and?

😀

[JoseBalow]

16. Winning!

[Journeyman]

17. Constipated and pissed-off is not a good way to go through life . . .

though it is a good way to get dead quicker.

[DFW]

19. That salad-free diet probably isn't conducive to longevity, either

Although I suppose I cannot discount the possibility that Republican dieticians have reached other conclusions.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

20. This made me smile

[Baitball Blogger]

21. I'm sure that their resistance to critical thinking and vaccines have something to do with it.

[bif]

22. Strengthening the gene pool!

Love it!