Democrats, facing a bloodbath in the November midterm elections, have turned to focus groups and polls to see what the best pandemic policy is. If you’re wondering what they saw, just look at what Democratic governors suddenly started doing about their states’ mask mandates.
When we first saw New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Delaware Gov. John Carney announce they were dropping their mandates both inside and outside of schools, we marveled at what seemed like extraordinary, if very belated, courage. After all, their fellow Democratic partisans had been demonizing Republican governors for doing exactly the same thing, even calling them murderers. But subsequently, many more Democrats abruptly, and without any visible explanation, similarly changed course on pandemic restrictions.
They were all clearly singing from the same hymnal. It turns out that Carney, Murphy, and all the others are not so brave after all — they are just scared of what their own polling is telling them: that people overwhelmingly want to return to normal and move past the pandemic — that they are far more annoyed by the restrictions than they are scared of the virus. As far as they are concerned, it’s over. Democratic politicians are just the last ones to figure it out.
In most Republican states, people stopped wearing masks last spring, when vaccines became widely available. It took a full year for Democrats to realize they could all be thrown out of office by voters angrily demanding their lives back after two years of pandemic restrictions that were psychologically traumatic, economically damaging, and accomplished nothing anyway. A new study out last week shows that the lockdown procedures adopted near the beginning of the pandemic served no purpose and may have even been counterproductive. As for the masking of children in schools, there was never any scientific basis for it in the first place. Children are not at a serious risk to catch or spread the novel coronavirus. Mask mandates should have been abandoned before the current school year began in fall 2021, but Democrats insisted and angrily attacked everyone who disagreed.
They even attacked parents for opposing them. Biden’s White House got involved in this up to its neck. Biden’s staff helped a school board organization draft a letter to Biden’s own Justice Department, a clear case of “astroturfing,” to prosecute parents angry over mask mandates as terrorists.
The sudden shift among Democratic officeholders on the question of masks is, of course, welcome, but it is not based on any change in the science or the data of the pandemic. Democrats are just afraid of being thrown out of office as they deserve.
Of course, it doesn’t look good to admit that your public health policy is based on focus groups, so some Democrats are desperately pretending this has something to do with the grand success of the Biden administration’s policy. This is, of course, delusional. Not only did nothing change to justify such a shift, but Biden’s minions don’t even believe their own story — his Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were still clinging to mask mandates and criticizing their abolition days after Democratic governors started making their panicked announcements.
Perhaps Biden is just “leading from behind” on the pandemic. Or perhaps his White House just isn’t as concerned about the new Democratic polling because, unlike most governors, he isn’t up for reelection until 2024. In any case, Biden’s White House staff are caught in a state of cognitive dissonance, forced to sympathize with Democratic governors who are dumping mask mandates while standing by their demonization of Republicans for doing exactly the same thing.
Biden is showing the nation who he is. He ran for office pretending to have a plan to kill off COVID. There was no plan. Once in office, he simply followed President Donald Trump’s plan to distribute the vaccines and declare victory. But he didn’t anticipate delta or omicron. These variants prevented Biden from claiming victory over the virus. At that point, he could have been humble and let each state pursue its own COVID strategy. But instead, he politicized the issue, viciously attacking Republican governors for letting people make up their own minds on masks. Now, Biden’s political allies are jumping off the train because they see Biden is driving them off a cliff.
