Why a Majority Rejected the Republican Approach to COVID
The MAGA feedback loop was both dangerous and mystifying.
Last week, The New York Times released the results of its latest poll of American attitudes toward COVID, which contained a fascinating partisan fact: More Americans approved of the Democratic response to the pandemic than the Republican response, and it’s not close. Only 32 percent of Americans say they supported the Republican response more than the Democratic response, while Democrats enjoyed the support of 45 percent.
In a closely divided country, that’s a large gap, and when you dive into the numbers, you see that the gap is substantially driven by older voters. Americans 65 and over believe the Democrats handled the pandemic better than Republicans by a 53 to 33 margin. This margin is particularly notable because you can’t ascribe it to background partisan bias.
Young voters, for instance, overwhelmingly supported the Democratic response to COVID (by the same 20-point margin as older voters), but they tend to be Democrats. Biden won that age cohort in 2020 by a similar margin. Older voters, however, lean Republican. Donald Trump won their votes 52–47.
In a piece about the poll, the Times’ David Leonhardt rightly notes that neither party has a perfect record on COVID. Nobody does. Our nation’s public-health officials were learning in real time about a novel coronavirus, and politicians had to make decisions based on partial information. Even if they were operating in absolute good faith in a completely functional political environment, they’d make mistakes. They’d still have to make tough decisions that included difficult trade-offs between, for example, public safety and economic vitality.
But we don’t live in a functional political environment, and our politicians don’t always operate in good faith. So we filtered partial information about the virus through different red and blue political cultures, and the result was remarkably consistent. Per the Brookings Institution, “Republicans consistently underestimate risks, while Democrats consistently overestimate them.”
From a policy perspective, this different risk analysis resulted in opposing kinds of errors. When Democrats erred, they erred on the side of excessive fear. When Republicans erred, they erred on the side of recklessness.
Both kinds of errors had real consequences, and no one should minimize the consequences of excessive caution. Prolonged school closures and lockdowns harmed both kids and adults. The learning loss to children alone will take years to overcome. But, as Leonhardt notes, minimizing COVID’s risks can be deadly (in May, a Brown University/Microsoft study estimated that vaccine refusal had cost almost 319,000 American lives). The consequences are not equal, and it’s quite telling that the most vulnerable community—America’s seniors—is most upset at the Republican response.
But voters tend not to be policy wonks. They’re not studying mortality charts or familiar with the latest comparisons between red-state and blue-state unemployment numbers. Instead, they live in particular cultures, and the deep-red culture around COVID became, quite frankly, paranoid, conspiracist, and just plain weird.
I qualify with the phrase “deep-red” because there are tens of millions of Republicans who never succumbed to COVID conspiracy theories or paranoia. They may have been (rightly) skeptical or even angry about extended lockdowns and school closures, but they also wore masks without complaint, and got vaccinated happily and immediately. If they were skeptical about vaccine mandates, it was because of concerns over state power, not because of fear of vaccines.
But there was and is another world, and that world was irrevocably influenced by both Trump’s early decision to downplay the virus (which locked in right-wing underestimation of the threat) and the underlying grievance and victim narratives that dominate right-wing media. Thus, the message sent to deep-red America wasn’t simply “Mainstream public-health officials are wrong about the virus”; it was something much more like, “Public-health measures are acts of aggression against your freedom and autonomy.”
When churches closed early in the pandemic, there were some Christians who saw the closures as the fulfillment of prophecies of persecution. In their minds, politicians were using COVID as a pretext. Their real objective was to cripple the Church.
It might be hard for readers in blue parts of the country to understand or relate to the culture that resulted. There were places where wearing a mask was deemed to be an act of submission worthy of mockery and scorn (some folks even called masks “face diapers”). It’s not that deep-red Americans were skeptical of all health measures to combat COVID; they were mainly skeptical of mainstream health measures. They jumped on alternative treatments such as hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin with gusto.
Although vaccine skeptics can be found in all American communities, Republicans have been disproportionately opposed, in spite of the fact that the vaccine effort, Operation Warp Speed, was arguably President Trump’s greatest accomplishment.
Republican opposition to COVID public-health measures was channeled through a news environment that emphasized every doubt about masks and the vaccine, heralded every study that appeared to vindicate alternative treatments, and amplified every single progressive error or excess.
The combination of rumor (right-wing social media was full of anecdotes about alleged vaccine-related injuries) and fact (the Supreme Court did repeatedly rule, for example, that California lockdown policies discriminated against religious gatherings) radicalized a segment of the right, turning it toxic and militant. Countless Americans didn’t just oppose public-health measures designed to combat the virus, they were deeply intolerant of anyone who disagreed.
And they remain intolerant and militant to this day. This is the part of the right that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appealed to when he condemned Dr. Anthony Fauci in a recent speech and said, “Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”
At the end of the pandemic, the militant right is remarkably self-congratulatory. Although its early comparisons to the flu were horribly, tragically wrong, and its anti-vaccine messaging has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, its members believe they got the pandemic right.
But America’s most vulnerable communities—including the seniors who lean Republican—know better. The doctors who worked in ICUs full of dying unvaccinated patients know better. After the initial, shocking death wave that began mainly in deep-blue cities, a clear and tragic pattern emerged. The counties with the highest vote shares for Trump consistently had the highest death rates from COVID. By the fall of 2021, the death rate in the most Trump-friendly counties was four times greater than the death rate in President Biden’s strongest counties.
I doubt, however, that there will be many true political consequences from this disparity. America is eager to move on from debates about the pandemic, and other matters dominate voters’ minds.
Moreover, the mistakes of both sides carried real costs. So no one should feel triumphant. Virtually everyone has at least some cause to feel chastened. The difference in response, thus, wasn’t necessarily between good and bad but between better and worse. When the Republican base radicalized, its culture created consequences. Most Americans rightly oppose that culture, and lament those consequences.
Some of my colleagues will be in conversation with several of today’s biggest names in business, culture, politics, and health next week at The Atlantic Festival. For a limited time, use the code TAFFRIEND for 50% off in-person registration.Learn more here.