It's still COVID!

When an election turns on very small margins, everyone who thinks they know why a shift in voter preferences happened can plausibly make a case for their opinion. And Donald Trump's victory over the Harris-Walz ticket was small:

Trump’s margins — both in raw votes and in percentages — were small by historical standards, even for the past quarter century, when close elections have been the rule, including the 2000 Florida recount election and Trump’s previous two races in 2016 and 2020. ... PBS

Sure, there was some movement away from Dems everywhere -- but also Dem candidates, especially for the U.S. Senate, did well in even in battleground states and the lower House of Congress remains almost evenly split.

So observers are still largely in "pick your poison" mode for explanations.

And I'm sticking to mine: the experience of COVID and COVID polarization somehow tossed many Americans off-center and we're still addled by a lingering awareness that our trust in how the world works could be upended by a germ -- or something else unknown and unforeseen.

David Wallace-Wells has chronicled how COVID and COVID politics have shaped our memories of living through the pandemic. His account might surprise you:

The story is this. When Covid arrived on American shores, the United States did not have to collapse into Covid partisanship, with citizen turning against citizen and each party vilifying the other as the source of our national misery. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war.

You may be laughing, but this is actually a pretty good description of what genuinely happened in the spring and summer of 2020, despite how you may remember those days now. Back then, the president was a lightning rod who seemed to polarize the country’s response all by himself, although he had rhetorical help from podcasters and radio hosts, governors and members of local school boards. But at the state and local levels, for many months, red and blue authorities moved in quite close parallel. For the most part, red and blue people did, too. ...

Present divisions came along later, with the development of vaccines (delivered to arms, though not invented, during the Biden term) and the higher mortality, especially in red states, in the pandemic's second year.

And from there, we got to where we are now, with Donald Trump appointing health authorities whose prominence was raised by distress about COVID. Here's David Wallace-Wells again.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] owes his current selection to pandemic backlash and the intuition, in Trump world, that Covid contrarians should be drafted into a broad insurgency against the institutions of science. ... the others named for top public health posts, though not transparent cranks, are also Covid contrarians whose most important qualification for these positions are their crusades against the public health establishment during the pandemic period: Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, and Johns Hopkins’s Marty Makary to run the Food and Drug Administration. Dave Weldon, Trump’s pick to oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a vocal vaccine skeptic long before the pandemic.

... Democrats have grown increasingly invested in, and identified with, the management style and worldview of the credentialed elite — with the Republicans, once the party of the country’s establishment, growing a lot more unruly as a party and a coalition.

But there are a few things that are nevertheless strange about what Benjamin Mazer called “The COVID-Revenge Administration” and the way its are united primarily by a “lasting rage” about the initial handling of the pandemic.

The first is that the federal pandemic response was actually supervised by Trump and many of those whom he appointed, the first time around. Americans often tell the story of Covid now as though our pandemic response was run by safetyist liberals in an unreasonable panic. But while Trump was remarkably indifferent to Covid in 2020, he was also, for the entire period we now remember erroneously as “lockdown,” in charge. (Americans often remember that period as stretching for multiple years; in fact, all but one state withdrew its stay-at-home orders within three months.)

The second is that, nearly five years on from the first reported Covid case, it’s not clear to what extent the public as a whole really did hate the country’s initial response to Covid. America exited the pandemic emergency into a period of post-pandemic exhaustion and frustration, one that undoubtedly contributed to public irritation with those liberals many Americans understood to be in charge....

Click to enlarge.Via Kevin Drum

... And the third is that, early in the pandemic, many of the leading Covid contrarians, including some of those now at the top of Trump’s short list, were among the most inaccurate voices making claims about what were then probably the two simplest and most important questions facing anyone trying to right-size the pandemic response. Namely, how bad things could get and how long it might last.

... at the outset, many of the most outspoken contrarians — today claiming vindication, complaining about censorship even after building huge social-media followings during the pandemic, were telling us that the most important thing to know about the pandemic was that it was simply not a big deal.

Over the course of the pandemic, many continued to argue against restrictions, even as they’d lessened considerably, and even as the disease made a mockery of their predictions about its ultimate toll. In time, the American public has in some ways grown more sympathetic — forgetting the panic of the initial months, taking somewhat for granted that the death toll would land near where it did and assessing the wisdom of those mitigation measures as though they had no effect on mortality at all. (As it happens, some research suggests that those measures could’ve saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.)

But to suggest that mitigation was pointless because the measures were ineffective in preventing mass death is functionally the opposite of arguing that it was pointless because so few lives were at stake. ...

“The problem with pandemics is that people want to forget them,” Michael Lewis wrote last spring in the foreword to “We Want Them Infected.” Of course, many people do want to forget, and understandably. But others want to litigate and relitigate and relitigate, and in some ways the imbalance of motives may be a bigger problem than pandemic amnesia itself, allowing those with the sharper critiques to furnish the frameworks that the otherwise indifferent grasp for when trying to make sense of their own experience. ...

We're all a little nuts when it comes to the pandemic and, for the moment, the anti-expertise side of various arguments is getting a turn in the sun. Let's hope we don't come to grief during their ascendancy.

 Dr. Leana S. Wen responded to the questions raised by seeing RFK implanted on top of U.S. health policy in "Should I get my vaccines while I can? Your questions, answered." (gift article) She's not entirely alarmist, but she suggests you make sure your vaccines are up to date if possible by January 20.