Analysis | The partisan divide on covid isn’t simply two groups pulling in separate directions – The Washington Post
While it seems as though partisanship has split every aspect of the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, that’s not true. Americans, regardless of political party (or, really, anything else) are deeply tired of the whole thing.
Which, sure. Who isn’t? Who wouldn’t be? And, in fact, who hasn’t been? Who wasn’t tired of the pandemic back in April 2020? Even since that point, the partisan divide wasn’t about whether people are eager to have the pandemic end. Instead, it has been about how the pandemic ends. Does it end with our simply deciding that the pandemic won’t disrupt our daily lives and returning to normal? Or does it end with our being cautious about containing the virus’s spread and, as a result, limiting the number of people who contract it and die?
That’s really it. That has always been it, and that is it now. The centerline of that tug-of-war has moved around, particularly with the advent of the omicron variant — an apparently less-lethal version of the virus that hinted at a scenario where the virus became akin to the seasonal flu.
But the debate is the same. When professional contrarian Bari Weiss declares on professional contrarian Bill Maher’s contrarianism-centered TV show that she is “done with covid,” she’s not saying anything that hasn’t been said for the past 20 months. She’s just centering a different rationale for the position.
On Tuesday morning, both Axios and the New York Times ran items that assessed the distinction between those who are and are not expressing concern about contracting the virus. Axios released new polling conducted by Ipsos that determined that President Biden’s effort to distribute free tests and high-quality masks was very popular — but that those who would most benefit from the broad adoption of those masks, the unvaccinated, are less likely to seek them out. At the Times, David Leonhardt detailed this long-established pattern, using it in part to contrast the partisan responses in the moment. More on that in a second.
Again, this isn’t new. Polling has shown for months and months that those less likely to worry about the virus are less likely to wear masks or to get vaccinated. That’s true within the parties, as well, as October polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation makes obvious. About half of vaccinated Democrats at that point said they were not concerned about getting sick from covid-19, compared to just under three-quarters of vaccinated Republicans. Among unvaccinated Republicans, the figure was about 4 in 5.
Why that difference? Unvaccinated Republicans almost universally thought the seriousness of the virus was exaggerated.
So did about half of vaccinated Republicans, but the distinction is important. It’s impossible to separate out the two approaches to the pandemic — back to normal versus caution — from politics because politicians have amplified the association of those two positions with partisanship. President Donald Trump began trying to insist that the country could get back to normal in the spring of 2020 because he wanted to get economic activity back on track before his reelection. Democratic officials urged caution in part to contrast themselves with Trump’s perceived indifference.
A critically important consideration, though, is that both of those positions have shifted to the right in the past months. Democratic officials (like Colorado Gov. Jared Polis) have begun advocating for fewer containment measures as vaccinations in their states have increased. Republican officials (like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) are actively encouraging skepticism about the vaccines, both by declining to encourage boosters and nodding at popular misinformation.
“Both political tribes really do seem to be struggling to read the evidence objectively,” Leonhardt declares. “As a result, the country is suffering thousands of preventable deaths every week while also accepting a preventable crisis of isolation that’s falling particularly hard on children.” The crisis of isolation that he identifies (and that has been focused on for some time) is based on the idea that Democratic parents express more concern about their kids getting sick and are more receptive to online learning. But, while there are certainly questions about guidelines for when schools and day-care centers need to close in response to infections, there are not broad school closures in the manner seen a year ago — even in places with Democratic leaders.
It is true that the risks to children are very low and that keeping schools and day-cares open makes sense. It’s also true, of course, that a virus spreading broadly and sickening people deteriorates in-school instruction in its own way, as New York City recently experienced. And it is important to point out that “both political tribes” having a partisan reaction does not mean that the effects of those reactions are equivalent.
It has consistently been the case that, excluding the initial wave of cases that preceded most containment recommendations, places that voted for Trump in 2020 have been harder hit by covid-19 deaths. That holds for last winter’s surge, for the delta surge last summer and even now, with omicron’s appearance.
About 39 million people live in the counties that voted for Trump by the widest margin. In those three waves, they lost about 67,400 residents between the start and the peak of those three waves. More than 57 million people live in the counties that voted for Biden. They lost about 37,600 residents to covid-19 in those waves.
Notice that the correlation to partisanship preceded the broad rollout of vaccines. Last winter’s wave occurred as vaccines were being rolled out. But redder parts of the country were harder to hit — presumably in part because those were the places where people were less concerned about the virus and eager to get back to normal. It was obvious early on that Republicans were disproportionately indifferent to mask-wearing or distancing recommendations, meaning that places with more Republicans were vulnerable to broader spread of the virus. This was an active choice being made!
The easiest way to track that sentiment is by looking at vaccination rates. Kaiser Family Foundation’s research has found that Republicans are much less likely to report having gotten vaccinated than are Democrats. There are three unvaccinated Republicans for every unvaccinated Democrat.
Vaccine hesitancy isn’t solely a function of party, of course. While Black and Hispanic Americans are about as likely to express hesitancy to vaccination as Whites overall, White Democrats are more likely to report being vaccinated than non-White Americans, who are far more likely to report being vaccinated than White Republicans.
Race and education and population density all overlap with partisanship, but those factors also correlate to vaccination rates even within parties. Even among Democrats, Pew Research Center polling shows, urban residents are more likely to be vaccinated, as are better-educated Democrats. Within the Republican Party, those same patterns hold. But, again, party takes primacy: The best-educated Republicans (those with advanced degrees) are as likely to be vaccinated as the least-educated Democrats.
Recent polling from YouGov, conducted for the Economist magazine, shows how concern about getting ill (those saying they are somewhat or very worried about contracting covid-19) correlates to other concerns. Interestingly, there’s no difference in concern relative to whether a respondent knows someone who died of the disease (the upper-left chart, below, shows a spread in worry about illness, shown on the vertical axis, even though each indicated group is about as likely to indicate it knows someone who died, shown on the horizontal axis). On the other metrics, the dots roughly form a diagonal line from lower left to upper right: More worry about getting sick correlates to worry about omicron, to mask-wearing and to getting a vaccine dose.
Responses for Black Americans are included to show both that they generally align with the population overall but also align closely with the Democratic value on mask-wearing. This makes sense, given that most Black Americans are Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents.
But, given the focus by many on the right on Black vaccination rates, it’s also useful to note that partisanship is a much better predictor of population-adjusted deaths in the three waves indicated above than is the density of the Black population. The larger circles on the graph below are at the bottom (more heavily pro-Trump) and at left (less densely Black).
Other recent polling from YouGov indicates that the partisan divide on approach to the virus is reflected in precisely the way you would expect: Republicans are more likely to report having been infected by the virus.
Again, everyone hates the pandemic. Everyone wishes it were gone and we didn’t have to fight over it. The partisan divide, though, isn’t between those overreacting by leaving themselves at risk and those hyperactively hunkering down, insisting on constraining themselves to a March-2020-like existence. It is, instead, primarily between those who support collective efforts to limit the spread of the virus, like getting vaccinated and wearing masks, and those who don’t support those efforts. Or, really, it seems increasingly to be between those who support figuring out what containment looks like in the omicron era and those who want to position mask-wearing or vaccination mandates as subsets of Nazism.
To the glee of the right, Leonhardt contrasts the “millions of Republican voters” who “have decided that downplaying Covid is core to their identity as conservatives” with the “millions of Democrats” who “have decided that organizing their lives around Covid is core to their identity as progressives.” That latter instinct, he continues, is to blame, at least to some degree, for things like increased violent crime and mental health problems. It is embodied, Leonhardt writes, in a tweet from gun-control activist David Hogg, who wrote that “the inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I’m a conservative.”
The downside to the Republican instinct is much more succinct and much more direct. It is that “the virus is killing many more Republicans than Democrats.” No need to parse various studies to thread a line back to where people were more adamant about supporting mask rules or shuttering restaurants. Just an arrow, this to that. Leonhardt also declined to include any of the numerous tweets from right-wing personalities making much starker claims about vaccines and masks that represent the much more direct connection between partisan sentiment and negative outcomes.
If you are interested, they’re not hard to find.
