Wes Nakagiri's cherry-picked data
On the front page of his website, Wes Nakagiri makes a correlation between Livingston County having a Republican county commission, and having a healthier county. However, he only includes four counties in his comparison: Livingston, Ingham, Washtenaw, and Genessee. Let's make a more complete comparison that includes all 83 of Michigan's counties. If I have any inaccuracies here, keep in mind that Nakagiri has a master's degree in applied statistics- I do not.
To make this comparison, I have gone through every county in the state of Michigan and created a “partisanship” score. This was done by going through the Board of Commissioners for each county, adding 0 for Democrats, 1 for Republicans, and 0.5 for anyone else, and then dividing by the number of seats. For example, Menominee County has 1 Democrat, 4 Republicans, and 4 commissioners with no party affilliation. This results in a score of ((0 × 1) + (0.5 × 4) + (1 × 4)) / 9 = 0.67. You can interpret this as having a Republican-leaning county commission as it has a score greater than 0.5.
If you graph this partisanship against the healthy county score that Nakagiri uses, you may notice that there's almost no correlation (With an R² = 0.0305) between partisanship and county health. Even if there was a correlation, there are important confounding variables to be accounted for, as, for example Democrat-majority counties have a significantly higher population density.
Here's what this graph looks like if you circle the data points that Nakagiri cherry picked:
You may notice there isn't that much of a difference between Washtenaw and Livingston in terms of health! Saying that Livingston has a score of 73 and Washtenaw has a score of 71 does not sound like that big of a difference, so instead Nakagiri distorts the data by saying they're 2nd and 7th instead, which sounds a lot more significant.
Have I talked about the fact that Nakagiri has a master's degree in applied statistics?
“But he's just comparing against our neighbors!”
Let's look at a map of the counties surrounding Livingston County:
If you look at this map, you might notice that Shiawassee and Oakland counties are also next to Livingston County. So why weren't they included? I think it's because they don't support the narrative Nakagiri is trying to push:
Oakland County is quite progressive - it has 13 Democrats and 6 Republicans on its Board of Commissioners. However, it ranks 4th in the healthiest counties ranking, with a score of 72.79 (Livingston County's score is 73.41).
Shiawassee on the other hand, is quite conservative - it has 7 Republicans and no Democrats. It ranks 26th in the Healthiest Communities ranking with a score of 54, putting it below both Ingham and Washtenaw counties.
Have I mentioned yet that Nakagiri has a master's degree in applied statistics?
Other stuff
“All data was updated on 8/11/2023”
Unfortunately, the “healthy county rank” data is still from 2018 (2021 data has been available from that website for quite a while now). It is quite misleading to say that “all data” has been updated when that isn't the case. Interestingly, Livingston County is now 3rd in Michigan's Healthy County Rank, as it has been overtaken by Leelanau County - a progressive county!
How many seats does Ingham County have?
This is a very minor nitpick, is probably a typo, and doesn't really matter, but I'll include it here anyways for completeness: Nakagiri claims that Ingham County has 4 Republicans and 12 Democrats. That implies there are 16 seats in Ingham county. There's just one slight problem: Ingham County's board of commissioners only has 15 seats. In 2021, 2019, and 2017 Ingham county had only 14 seats.