How fear switched parties during COVID

In the spring of 2017, a Stanford professor named Douglas Rivers arrived on Harvard’s campus to give a presentation called “What the Hell Happened?”

It was about the 2016 election which, as you might recall, went a little differently than many pollsters thought it would.

During his presentation, Rivers cited a polling question that proved incredibly revealing — and that, post-COVID, may change how you think about why a pandemic fractured America.

In 2016, ordinary Americans were offered two extreme views of the world and asked which one they identified with more. See where you fall:

Pollsters phrased the first view this way: “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

They phrased the second view this way: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not become isolated.”

Rivers said that even those who worked with him made fun of this question, calling it the kumbaya question. But, as it turned out, it was a powerful indicator.

The question, he said, “was almost as good as asking people how they’re going to vote.”

About 80 percent of people who identified with the more frightening view of the world voted for Donald Trump, and about 80 percent of people who identified with the kumbaya view of the world voted for Hillary Clinton.

And it’s important to note: Neither vision makes any mention of being pro-life or pro-choice. They take no stand on taxes or universal pre-K. Nor do they indicate whether we should worry that greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere.

People had chosen their approach to the world, and once they identified which team (R or D) seemed aligned with that approach, their views flowed from that.

Marc Hetherington wrote about this enormous cultural divide in his book, “Prius or Pickup?,” along with fellow University of North Carolina political scientist Jonathan Weiler.

The book argued that everything from parenting styles to food preferences to, yes, cars can reflect the culture you belong to. Indeed, a 2020 study of 46,000 car owners found that Honda Civics, for example, leaned way left. Kia Fortes leaned notably right. Toyota RAV4 Hybrids leaned left; Jeep Wranglers leaned right. Democrats are more inclined to drive hybrid and electric cars, as well as premium brands like Audi, Volvo, and BMW. Republicans, meanwhile, snap up full-size SUVs and trucks (if you have a heavy-duty pickup truck, you’re about 10 times as likely to be a Republican as a Democrat).

In reality, Hetherington told me, Republicans and Democrats aren’t as far apart on many issues as we think. For example, he said, lots of Republicans were worried about COVID in 2020 and supportive of the sorts of restrictions that Trump rejected. They supported school closures and the cancellation of sporting events in almost the same numbers as Democrats.

“And still almost none of them could pull the lever for Joe Biden... a white guy from Pennsylvania. Old. Completely unthreatening.”

Why?

“The issues don’t matter that much,” he said. “They’re kind of a sideshow to all of this. For most Republicans — and most Democrats too — anyone is better in their party than someone in the other party.”

I told Hetherington that lots of people are going to read this and shake their heads.

Sure, other people might be driven by partisanship. But they (meaning you) are driven by careful and deep consideration of the issues.

Hah, says Hetherington. “The people who don’t think it’s partisanship for them are completely un-self-aware. It is. It is for all of us.”

He notes that most folks simply don’t follow politics very closely, so it’s just easier to adopt the positions of the team they’ve chosen. For example, polling shows that a majority of Americans agree that the government should spend more on infrastructure and social services, but that doesn’t mean they vote that way.

But, wait! What if you listen to and read lots and lots of news? What if you’re really smart? Then you do vote based on the issues, right?

Hah, says Hetherington. He argues that people like that tend to use their intellect to justify almost any position adopted by their team. “What we find is that the people who get it wrong the most are the most partisan, but they’re also the smartest.”

So, what have the last two years of a pandemic taught us about this sort of entrenched partisanship?

COVID, Hetherington says, threw a weird wrench into what many scholars thought they knew about Democrats and Republicans. Conservatives who had embraced the-world-is-a-dangerous-place view espoused by Trump in 2015 and 2016 suddenly supported leaders who threw caution to the wind. Liberals who had rejected the idea of deferring to authority or fear became fearful and deferential to authority.

Hetherington says: Voters kind of started blowing his mind.

“I think all of us — political scientists and psychologists — who have been using this dangerous-world framework to understand American politics, we simply missed something.”

It seems, he says, that conservatives tend to worry more about threats from other people. Democrats, meanwhile, worry about different sorts of things, like global warming and infectious diseases.

But Hetherington believes that partisanship has influenced much of how we’ve behaved during the pandemic.

In 2020, when Trump said schools should reopen, a Boston-area friend — knowing that we live in one of the most anti-Trump states in the country — commented to me: “Crap. Now our schools aren’t going to reopen. Maybe if he had kept his mouth shut, there would have been a chance.”

“I think [that assessment] was totally right,” says Hetherington.

But if partisanship runs deep, it can also be creatively redeployed. Hetherington and colleagues created a public service announcement in mid-2020 showing retired General Hugh Shelton explaining that masks could help slow the virus — and donning a mask himself. Republicans who saw the PSA were 10 to 15 percent more likely to wear a mask.

“We just have to find the right messengers,” Hetherington says. “And this isn’t just on COVID. This could be on anything.”

In fact, it was the military’s deep concern about global warming that initially got him to consider the possibility that military leaders could serve as effective messengers to a more conservative audience.

During the pandemic, though, those sorts of unexpected messengers have not been enlisted on a large scale. And that should worry us, when we consider what’s ahead, and how far apart the bases of the parties currently are.

On the Democratic side, voter sentiment in the 2022 and 2024 elections threatens to whittle away any ability for Democrats to meaningfully shape health policy.

“Democrats better wake up to the fact that people are tired of the pandemic and restrictions,” says Hetherington. “The partisan margins in so many states are so close. And it doesn’t take that many Democrats who are dispirited to stay home to swing an election in the other direction.”

On the Republican side, meanwhile, hesitancy about non-COVID vaccines (like the flu vaccine) is mushrooming, he says. “The people at Moderna and Pfizer have gotten in touch with us about the work that we’ve done because they’re terrified about the polarization of attitudes about vaccines more generally.”

Somehow, in less than two years, the pandemic has managed to deepen our cultural divide. And it may have set the stage for upheavals in both politics and public health.

Kind of makes you wonder what the hell happened.

---

Follow Kara Miller on Twitter @karaemiller.