Democrats and Republicans can agree on one thing coming out of their respective conventions: Almost no one cares about Covid anymore.
Infections are running rampant after the Democratic confab in Chicago, with staffers on Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, reporters and other convention-goers all stricken — and in at least one case claiming the positive test was “worth it.” Cases also cropped up after the Republican National Convention in July.
And yet the single most-animating issue of the 2020 election is an afterthought for the major-party nominees coming out of two of the 2024 campaign’s biggest milestones — even as the virus remains an ever-present threat that’s shaped broader debates over key electoral issues like strength of the economy and the future of families’ health and child care.
Both campaigns have struggled with how — and how much — to address a pandemic that the U.S. never fully defeated, but that few Americans still want to dwell on.
Former President Donald Trump has bemoaned in speeches and interviews that he “never got the credit that we really deserved” for helping accelerate vaccine development in 2020, even as he later cast doubt on the shots’ importance and has more recently maneuvered to gain the backing of prominent vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his supporters. Vice President Kamala Harris lauded President Joe Biden for bringing the pandemic “under control” when she took over his campaign but has hardly mentioned Covid since. Both parties have blamed the other for allowing deaths to spike under their watches.
“It’s very difficult to talk about politically, because it’s still present and neither side wants to acknowledge that this pandemic is still around,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee with a background in global health.
But “if it continues to worsen,” Bartlett said, “both parties will be forced to address it.”
The rhetorical vacuum around Covid comes even as cases have surged over the summer, hospitalizing thousands and killing nearly 700 people in one week in late July. Though that is far less than during the height of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, Covid still ranks as a top-10 cause of death — and more broadly, a disease capable of disrupting people’s everyday lives.
Yet Americans have never been less interested in the virus. Just a fraction of adults are seeking out new Covid vaccines each year, and even fewer wear masks or take the basic precautions that were once seen as standard.
“Voters do not like it being brought up at all,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic strategist and pollster for Biden’s 2020 campaign, who marveled at the near-total absence of masks at a Democratic convention where roughly 20,000 people crammed into Chicago’s United Center for a week. “They want to get over it.”
With Covid receding from voters’ collective conscious — even as reports of post-convention cases keep coming — strategists posit it’s likely best for both candidates if talk of the pandemic fades away with it.
“Trump would be smart to just not talk about it,” said Mark Graul, a Wisconsin-based Republican consultant. And given the “relation” between the pandemic and the Biden-led economic recovery effort that voters now associate more with soaring inflation than rapid job growth, Graul said, “I’m not so sure it’s a smart move for [Harris] either.”
Lake, who has conducted focus groups across the battleground states, added that the only voters who bring up Covid now unprompted tend to be hardcore Trump supporters eager to bash the Biden administration’s response. And even those who might be inclined to side with Democrats on the issue prefer health care messaging that excludes mention of the pandemic.
Inside a Biden White House that has now reoriented itself around electing Harris, senior officials have continued to keep an eye on Covid, wary of a particularly dangerous flare-up during the key stretch of the election that could force the virus back into the public consciousness and damage Democrats politically.
But much of the day-to-day work has been shifted out of the White House and back to a Health and Human Services Department far less tied to political dynamics of the moment.
The Food and Drug Administration just approved updated Covid vaccines that are now rolling out widely. Those will be central to a just-launched fall campaign led by HHS called “Risk Less. Do More” encouraging people to get both their Covid booster and flu shot in tandem. The administration also plans to restart its distribution of free Covid tests at the end of September.
Biden and Harris, though, are not expected to play much of a public role in that effort, driven in large part by a recognition that most Americans mulling their vote ahead of November don’t want to hear about Covid — and a White House that has little desire to remind them.
“For most people, Covid is less about getting an infection and more about a period of time when our lives were super disrupted — and that is behind us,” said Ashish Jha, the Biden White House’s former Covid response coordinator. “We do still have a public health problem, but it is no longer in any way a substantive societal problem.”
White House spokesperson Kelly Scully touted the administration’s initial pandemic response as critical to ensuring that Covid “no longer meaningfully disrupts the way we live our lives,” while pointing to the ongoing efforts to manage the virus by making tests, vaccines and treatments widely available.
“When President Biden and Vice President Harris came into office, America was flat on its back reeling from a once-in-a-century pandemic with no plan from the previous administration to deal with Covid-19,” Scully said. “The Biden-Harris Administration took swift action to get America vaccinated — and get our economy and schools opened up.”
Yet two years removed from the pandemic’s crisis period, polling shows that Covid ranks far down the list of urgent voter priorities heading into November — if it shows up in surveys at all — with few Americans eager to revisit the painful memories of the pandemic era. The government has relaxed guidelines originally meant to limit the virus’ spread. And when Biden contracted Covid again in July, he did not wear a mask in public while actively shedding the virus.
During Biden’s abbreviated reelection run, he pointed to Covid as an example of the contrast in leadership between Trump and himself — accusing his predecessor of exacerbating a national crisis that he later said he successfully cleaned up. The president also highlighted the pandemic to show how much the economy had improved on his watch since then.
But that strategy never resonated with much of the electorate, and Harris has opted to take her campaign in a different direction by focusing almost exclusively on the future.
Fixating on the events of three years ago, aides and allies said, would risk distracting from the forward-looking campaign themes that have energized the electorate — and remind voters of the pinch they felt in their wallets from the inflation that grew out of the pandemic era.
But there is little benefit for Trump to harp on Covid, either. The Republican has long struggled to reconcile his messaging on Covid, torn between wanting credit for Operation Warp Speed, the program that accelerated developing the vaccine, and appealing to a base that distrusts mask and vaccine mandates and, in some cases, the very shot itself. He has recently attempted to play more into the latter, saying he would rehire military service members fired over Covid vaccine mandates “with an apology and with back pay” and threatening to withhold federal dollars from schools that require the jab.
“Any current debate on [Covid] is relatively meaningless,” said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin. “Each party cancels the other out.”
Harris’ campaign declined to comment while Trump’s campaign did not respond to an inquiry.
Still, the unpredictable nature of Covid — which is mutating more quickly than drugmakers can keep up with and is fueling surges outside of the typical winter period than infectious diseases experts initially predicted — could make it harder for Trump and Harris to ignore, especially if cases remain elevated as voting gets underway. Nearly one-third of respondents to a recent Axios-Ipsos poll said Covid poses a “large” or “moderate” risk to their health — an uptick from the same survey in early June, when cases were lower.
The “shock value” of each surge is more “muted” now that there are treatments and vaccines to prevent severe illness, Suffolk University polling director David Paleologos said.
But “as the virus spreads,” he added, “so will its importance in voters’ minds.”
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