As we enter yet another wave of covid resurgence, this time fueled by the “I’m as transmissible as chicken pox” delta variant, and hear warnings that an even worse variant could emerge, the ability of health officials and political leaders to persuade Americans to get vaccinated and take mitigating action like wearing masks remains as urgent as ever. Yet the dominant single fact of the U.S. response to this pandemic is that this public health effort has long been politicized and undermined by the Republican Party, ever since Donald Trump made denial of the severity of covid and the pandemic central to his re-election effort, as a way to excuse his incompetence in stopping its spread and to resist the economic restrictions that he saw as harmful to his re-election. In a Republican Party that had come to view Trump less as a president and more as a figure of cult-like worship, Trump’s interests (and the interests of businesses who prioritized profit over saving citizens’ lives) became the interests of the GOP. And so the GOP quickly became the Grand Old Party of covid denialism, the attitudes of Republican elites being reflected among the rank and file, and continuing in many ways to this day; according to a recent poll cited in a Vox article, “95 percent of Democrats are already vaccinated or want to get vaccinated, while just 50 percent of Republicans report the same.”
This has presented public health officials and Democratic politicians with a basic conundrum — how to take on anti-covid attitudes without triggering political resistance based on people’s identities as Republicans? Among other things, this has resulted in a clear reluctance to critique Republican opposition to common-sense measures like vaccines and masking. There has certainly been value in making good-faith efforts not to alienate Republican rank-and-file through such a strategy.
However, we’re at a point where Democrats need to seriously re-consider whether holding their fire against Republican politicians and right-wing commentators is doing more harm than good, both in terms of the immediate need to mitigate the delta surge, and from the longer-term perspective of holding the GOP accountable for propounding health policies that teeter somewhere between manslaughter and mass murder. In Texas and Florida, governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are apparently competing to determine which of them is the most incompetent GOP governor in the union, with Abbott forbidding localities from requiring mask mandates and DeSantis fighting to make sure unvaccinated kids don’t have to wear masks at school, even as covid cases in their respective states are soaring. Paul Waldman draws the line from their sabotage straight back to our former president, writing that the two governors “are using their power to prevent local officials from implementing basic public health measures in a highly selective way that is plainly molded around the obsessions of former president Donald Trump and his movement, not anchored in any genuine public interest rationale.” It also appears that Governor Abbott is concerned about appearing weak to right-wing voters in an upcoming primary fight should he reinstate anti-covid measures, leading to the very real possibility that he’s chosen to put his political future over the present lives of his constituents.
The current reality of the pandemic puts the facts squarely on the side of taking on Republican resistance more directly. We are now a year and a half into this catastrophe, with plentiful evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Beyond any reasonable doubt, vaccine reluctance and opposition to mitigation measures have demonstrably made the horrific scale of the delta wave possible — blowing up a tacit Republic strategy that the pandemic could be defeated by a lackadaisical approach that downplayed and undercut the most basic tools of public health. However difficult and fraught the path may be, the Democrats must recognize that the Republican Party is effectively undermining the U.S. pandemic response, and needs to figure out a way to make GOP party leaders back down to prevent even more preventable loss of life.
Beyond this, the Democrats need to recognize that many Republican leaders have decided to continue politicizing covid, including promotion of anti-scientific attitudes, as a key strategy for winning the 2022 and 2024 elections. The GOP will be all too eager to blame Democrats for any backsliding in the coronavirus fight, and Democrats need to counter this effort to rewrite the GOP's sordid history of undermining the national effort. As Greg Sargent writes, “The bottom line is that these Republicans are actively trying to polarize the country around covid, for nakedly instrumental purposes. That’s because in midterm elections, the angrier the out-of-the-White House party’s voters are, the more likely it is that their torqued-up turnout will swamp the more complacent in-party’s voters.”
So if the prevailing attitude up to now has been that Democrats needed to figure out how to de-politicize public health questions, clear evidence that Republican intransigence is prolonging the country’s suffering points to the opposite solution: that the Democrats engage more fully in the political aspects of the covid response.
First and foremost, this would involve critiquing Republican elected officials for demonstrably incompetent policies that are killing those officials’ constituents. Sargent goes on to note that the Biden administration may be starting to grasp the need for such a course change; just last week, the president criticized the polices in Texas and Florida (though, as Sargent notes, without directly naming the states’ governors). Sargent writes:
[The] thinking inside the White House is plainly that this is a tough balance to get right. Escalating political brawls around these arguments could conceivably make it harder to get more Republicans vaccinated.
And yet, it’s fair game politically to call out all this bad acting. Democrats should stand squarely on the right side of what will inevitably be a cultural battle: If Republicans are actively working to polarize the electorate, Democrats have a responsibility to level with their own voters about the public threat posed by cynically motivated GOP anti-vax and anti-mask derangement.
Sargent’s last point dovetails with the case I tried to make last week: that Democrats have a tremendous interest in rallying their voters in a way that counters the ongoing GOP radicalization of its base. On the covid front, Democrats should not allow overblown fears of further politicizing the pandemic response from reminding their voters that, just as Democrats are what stands between them and future insurrections, Democrats are also what stands between them and the pandemic spiraling out of control should the GOP return to power. It would also be smart politics to remind voters that we would not be in nearly as bad a place with the pandemic were it not for President Trump’s failed leadership and promulgation of anti-masking attitudes that still haunt the country’s response. This is a case where good politics is also good public health policy: the more Democrats can be encouraged to hammer their elected officials, and raise GOP concerns about a wipeout in 2022 and beyond due to Democrats mobilized by covid fears, the greater the possibility that the GOP will respond to such pressures.
But the arguments Sargent makes can be pushed even further. Democrats have an interest not only in communicating to their own voters about the threat of bad GOP health policy, but to communicate this to the GOP’s rank-and-file as much as possible, with the goal of inducing those voters to put pressure on their Republican officials to reverse noxious policies, and to persuade some of them to switch to supporting Democrats in future elections (the possibility of which would also help impel GOP politicians to change their attitudes in the here and now).
Suggestively, efforts by the likes of DeSantis and Abbott to double-down on deadly policies are happening at the same time that other elements of the GOP seem to be backing off their previous efforts to undermine vaccination efforts. Talking Points Memo and others have noted what seems almost to be a coordinated initiative by politicians like House minority whip Representative Steve Scalise and talking head Sean Hannity to turn on a dime and talk about the benefits of vaccination. The likeliest explanation for this turn is what has always been the greatest threat to Republican disinformation and obstructionism: reality. As Josh Marshall describes at Talking Points Memo, “we can see a sudden collision between vaccine resistance advocacy, which has more and more become an emblem of Republican partisan affiliation, and the explosion of cases hitting hardest in regions with the lowest rates of vaccination.” Whether through a sudden outbreak of having a conscience, or — far likelier — out of fear for their political futures as their constituents fear for their lives, some Republican officials and media figures are starting to see a downside to downplaying basic steps to ending the pandemic. If the GOP is beginning to see political weakness in their covid attitudes, then this seems like a good time for the Democrats to exploit such weakness, both in the name of public health and political self-interest. Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress will rightly be judged by voters for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic. If Democrats fail to devise a strategy to confront the GOP’s politically-motivated efforts to undermine the country’s response, then the party and the public health will both pay the price.