It’s the Covid Response, Stupid

A recent Morning Consult poll held out that the Covid-19 pandemic is just not a top-of-mind issue for voters anymore. U.S. News summed it up: “The share of voters who see the COVID-19 pandemic as a main issue in the midterm election has dropped to 31% — its lowest point since tracking began in January.”

It’s true, in the strict sense, that voters are less and less inclined to feel that politicians should filter everything through the Covid-19 prism.

But give me a break. We have just gone through a national political trauma and disruption to our way of life the likes of which we’ve never experienced before, and many never want to experience anything like it ever again. Voters currently cite the economy and inflation as their top issues, far outranking abortion and guns. Crime is often second or third in the priority list of voters, according to all pollsters. This is all downstream of Covid. We are still climbing out of our pandemic response, and our politics reflect that. The 2020 election was about Donald Trump. The 2022 election is about where you stood on Covid, and the aftermath.

Worldwide, the economic dislocations, the supply-chain problems, and inflation are all downstream of the Covid response. We spent trillions on an experiment in sudden-onset guaranteed income, which was combined with forcibly lowered productivity. So did many other governments. China is still shutting down huge sectors of its society to stop the spread of Covid, thereby slowing the manufacturing of all sorts of goods upon which worldwide industry relies. Of course inflation was going to be one result.

Pandemics are times of moral mania, going back to the Middle Ages. The mania, mid-Covid, to defund police departments after the George Floyd tragedy shattered police forces in cities such as Portland, Ore. Cities that took this turn lost experienced leadership and have remained understaffed ever since. Seattle’s own woman-of-color police chief was asked to take a pay cut before she resigned. Progressive prosecutors, such as Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, in an effort to bring about racial justice, have refused to enforce laws against illegal gun possession. Gun crimes are on the rise, and truly appalling murders are now occurring in neighborhoods not previously known for crime. And we had the repeated spectacle of leaders selectively breaking their own draconian Covid rules in order to march with crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters.

Whole patterns of life were upset by the Covid protocols; in the upheaval, people’s institutional allegiances shifted. Citizens in some states saw their churches closed down for more than a year. Many churches that complied with mandates out of meekness to the state, or conviction, never reopened again. They were outflanked by those shepherds who did tend their sheep in a crisis. Public schools saw enrollment decrease by 2 million students. Parochial schools saw their decade-long trend of decline suddenly shift into reverse. Private-school enrollment soared, as did the number of students being homeschooled. The sum of these facts is that the new populist orientation of individual voters organized itself under the pressure of the pandemic into new social groupings and budding institutions. These churches and schools will provide form and leadership to a prolonged populist insurgency in our politics for a long time to come.

What’s to explain the huge shift of suburban women back into the GOP fold? They haven’t forgotten Trump, who repulsed them. They know about the fall of Roe v. Wade. But many of them also remember that their little kids were masked at school — even at speech therapy — for months or years, only for health authorities to eventually call these masks “little more than useless decorations.” They see the speech delays, the social-development milestones missed, the low reading scores. They see crime rising. And local school boards that became obsessed with eliminating “whiteness” rather than illiteracy.

Over 352,000 New Yorkers left their state from mid 2020 to mid 2021. Over 100,000 New Yorkers in 2021–22 have moved to Florida. Despite the exodus of likely Republican-leaning voters, New York governor Kathy Hochul is seen as a drag on the Democratic ticket up and down the state, and her challenger, relative unknown Lee Zeldin, is at least within striking distance, according to most polls. His standing attracted the campaigning zeal of Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin and Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

And speaking of Ron DeSantis. Can anyone even remember four years ago? He was considered a punch line by the corporate political press, an improbable victor over his opponent in a tight race, abasing himself to Trumpian populists to win. Meanwhile, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan was considered by the same press to be presidential timber. She even got a serious look to be a vice-presidential contender. Guess which one of these governors is cruising to reelection, and which one is struggling?

Now, Ron DeSantis is seen as a serious threat, not only in a run for president but toppling Donald Trump while doing so. Why? Because of his response to Covid-19. DeSantis rejected what he called “Fauci-ism” while Donald Trump kept the famous doctor front and center.

Covid-19 completely reordered our politics. This is the first election where we’ll see what that looks like.