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> The median age at death was 78 years (IQR, 71-89 years).

Hey, that is better than the average life expectancy in Ohio.

Note that they only measured the mortality among registered voters of age 25 and up. Obviously that group will have a higher average life expectancy than the general population, since everyone who died young will not be taken into account.
TL;DR: "Our study found evidence of higher excess mortality for Republican voters compared with Democratic voters in Florida and Ohio after, but not before, COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults in the US. These differences in excess death rates were larger in counties with lower vaccination rates."

The authors do not make any recommendations themselves, but to me it seems that any organization that depends on followers voting for them should be worried if their voter base dies off faster than that of the competition.

Existing voters get older, and presumably more susceptible to misinformation and scaremongering, every year.
> Republican-leaning and Democratic-leaning counties differ in ways other than political party affiliation, such as racial and ethnic composition, rurality, and educational levels, making it difficult to establish whether the differences in COVID-19 death rates are associated with political party affiliation or other differences in county-level characteristics.

So are they hoping people just read the article title, go "heh!", and not think if there's a valid metric or correlation at play?

> Research before the COVID-19 pandemic has also found evidence of higher death rates in Republican-leaning counties than Democratic-leaning counties.

So they found nothing new?

They found a significant knee in the rates when the vaccine became available.

Quoting the complicating factors without mentioning the attempts to adjust for them is disingenuous.