Base Rates Deflate AfD Death Panic

With tens of thousands of local candidates on ballots and average ages around 60, a handful of late-campaign deaths—even clustered in one party—can occur without conspiracy. A rough calculation puts six AfD candidate deaths in a month at about a 1‑in‑200 anomaly, rare but not extraordinary. — It cautions against turning statistical clusters into political‑violence narratives without denominators and age structure, improving how media and platforms handle election-season scares.

Sources

America is not a town

José Duarte 2025.10.02 78% relevant

Like the AfD example, the author argues that focusing on rare events in a huge population misleads audiences; here, he applies base‑rate reasoning to mass school shootings, noting ≈10 incidents in 25 years across ~100,000 schools and criticizing media 'marination' that treats America as a small town.

Six AfD candidates have died ahead of municipal elections in Nordrhein-Westfalen. They are very unlikely to have been the victims of a covert assassination campaign.

eugyppius 2025.09.02 100% relevant

The author’s estimate using NRW’s candidate counts (~90,000), several thousand AfD entrants, and reported causes of death to derive a ~1‑in‑200–1‑in‑250 likelihood.