science

Oh man, I wish you had actually read the article and seen how they already factored that in, because nothing you wrote is relevant to the actual study referenced here.

But this is the internet, where you don't have to read a thing in order to mansplain that thing back to everyone else.

The salient point you missed: This is a study of ONE GROUP OF PEOPLE OVER TIME.

"We find that conservative Americans in this cohort, who were about as healthy as liberals in the early 2010s, experienced worsening health through the 2010s and higher mortality in the early 2020s. Roughly half of this new health gap is due to people changing their ideology over time, with new entrants to the conservative coalition being less healthy than new liberals. But another sizeable share is due to people who were already liberal or conservative diverging more in health over time. Changes in the socio-economics of the liberal and conservative coalitions—including education, income and insurance status—contribute to both processes.

"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."

Next time, read the fucking article first.

The article discusses tracking a group of people over time who are of the same age and how their health diverges.

To understand the relationship between politics and health in recent decades, we draw on individual-level medical data and death records from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (referred to as the Add Health survey), which has tracked a nationally representative cohort of people who were adolescents in the 1990s (most born between 1976 and 1982) over the course of their lifetimes16. Unusually among health studies, Add Health includes a measure of political beliefs: self-reported liberal–conservative placement. It thus captures individual political orientation and medically validated health measures (for example, haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels) and their changes over time, and individual-level cause-of-death data that extend into the COVID-19 era.

I do believe that's part of it.

Good to see the other empathetic person here. Thanks, Weevil.

Even if your views don't change significantly with age, the mere act of moving from progressive activism to defending gained ground from backslide is inherently conservative.

The only way to stay progressive is to continuously advocate for the positions of youth, even when you don't understand or agree with them.