Public Opinion? It’s Still All About the Virus.

Public Opinion? It’s Still All About the Virus.

If the pandemic is raging in November, expect voters to toss out the incumbents. If it isn’t, all the Covid mini-flaps will likely be forgotten.

Probably not the end of the world.

Photographer: Twitter/@staceyabrams

By Jonathan Bernstein

Over the weekend, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams faced a bit of a flap in which she posed maskless for a photo with a bunch of masked students and teachers. Her opponents were quick to call her out for hypocrisy; she responded by slamming their behavior during the pandemic. Abrams, of course, isn’t the first candidate or elected official who has been caught doing something that seemed to violate pandemic guidelines they publicly supported.

But here’s my guess: Most of this stuff isn’t going to matter in November.

What will likely matter are the facts on the ground about the pandemic and its effects. Not how leaders act about it. Not even the policy choices they make. Just whether it’s (mostly) gone or not. If the omicron wave is followed by another major summer surge — the 2021 delta wave ran from July through October — then voters are going to be in very poor spirits, and they’re going to take it out on the incumbent party and elect a lot of Republicans. It will be even worse if supply-chain problems and worker shortages are still ongoing problems.

On the other hand, if the pandemic actually does subside in 2022, then I’d be very surprised if anything virus-related winds up being what voters, or many candidates, are talking about in November.

If the pandemic is still bad, it’s quite likely that Republican attacks will center on things like hypocrisy, and on their policy recommendations to declare the pandemic “over.” If so, that’s what Republican voters will say they’re supporting. But the truth is that most of us decide how to vote first and then figure out why, often adopting campaign rhetoric to explain decisions we’ve already made. That happens most obviously for strong partisans, who go into every campaign with their minds already made up to support their party’s candidates. But it happens for swing voters, too. For them, it’s about whether or not to throw the bums out, which winds up turning on how they feel things are going generally. But they, too, may adopt reasons for their decisions that come from candidate ads.

In fact, general pessimism sparked by two years of the pandemic seems to me the likely answer to a lot of public-opinion puzzles. For one, there was an interesting discussion last week between Paul Krugman, David Leonhardt and Nate Cohn about why U.S. public opinion about the economy is so starkly negative despite the evidence (and, yes, that evidence includes a high inflation rate, but opinion is far more negative than that statistic and others should produce). For another, there’s survey information showing increasing partisan polarization over more and more aspects of the pandemic, to the extent that Democrats who are objectively at low risk believe they’re in considerably more danger than Republicans who are at relatively high risk. It seems to me that the most likely reason for both of these phenomena is the same: The pandemic has people generally unhappy, and that’s what’s driving all sorts of public opinion. When people are unhappy, they’re not likely to think the economy is very good. Meanwhile, it’s not surprising that people would look for anything that looks like a solution after the virus has been raging so long and hopes have been repeatedly dashed.

If this is correct, the fading of the omicron wave and a period of good news about the pandemic will be a precondition for improved public opinion about the economy, about President Joe Biden, and pretty much anything else. How much good news will it take? I don’t think anyone has any idea.