Study: 11% More Clinton Voters Than Trump Voters Evacuated Before Hurricane Irma Struck Florida

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Whether partisan beliefs influence actual behavior, especially when the stakes are high, is also something surveys do not adequately capture. To test this question, Long and her colleagues turned to hurricane evacuation rates.

Three major hurricanes occurred in the U.S. 2017: Harvey, Irma and Maria. In the weeks between Harvey and Irma, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio host in the U.S., whose conservative talk show draws 15.5 million weekly listeners—said that the government and media were exaggerating Irma’s severity to advance a climate change agenda. “These storms, once they actually hit, are never as strong as they’re reported,” he told listeners. This message was amplified by other conservative pundits, such as Ann Coulter, and by several mainstream media outlets.

To test how much weight was given to these comments, Long and her colleagues used location data down to the level of neighborhood blocks from more than 2.7 million Florida and Texas residents’ smartphones. The information allowed them to estimate where individuals live based on the phones’ location at night. The researchers determined someone evacuated when a cell phone moved away from its typical nighttime location at least 24 hours before a storm’s landfall. They calculated evacuation rates for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in in Texas and Florida, respectively, as well as for Hurricane Matthew, which hit Florida in 2016.

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The findings were striking: an estimated 45 percent of likely Clinton voters evacuated prior to Hurricane Irma, while just 34 percent of Trump voters did so. Tellingly, however, these differences did not emerge during Hurricane Harvey, less than a month prior, or Hurricane Matthew—which did not receive the same level of haranguing from Limbaugh or Coulter. While the findings do not definitively prove that Limbaugh’s promotion of hurricane skepticism caused Republicans to stay put, the differences uncovered in the study “can’t be explained by any other correlation, like Democrats living near the coast,” Long says. “When you get to this level of spatial precision, the storm couldn’t possibly hit Democratic areas more than Republican ones.”

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-trump-favoring-voters-ignored-a-deadly-hurricane-warning/