The Republican outrage machine has so little material that they’ve resorted to reruns. Now that nobody believes teachers perform gender reassignment surgery in schools, they’ve gone back to COVID. All over the internet, conservatives are getting outraged over restrictions that ended five years ago.
They dragged Anthony Fauci in front of a Congressional committee and used his refusal to testify — citing the Fifth Amendment — as proof that he was up to no good. In their telling, Fauci was the villain of COVID. They don’t like to remember that Trump appointed him to the White House Coronavirus Task Force, took his advice, and stuck him in front of the cameras. They’re really just blasting Democrats for policies that Trump enacted.
In North Carolina, Republicans are trying to make a conversation then-Governor Roy Cooper had with Fauci a campaign issue. At the time, the pandemic was less than six months old and Fauci was Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Cooper wasn’t doing anything nefarious. He was just doing his job, checking in with experts before making difficult decisions at an unprecedented time in our history.
Most people don’t care. They’ve moved on. The pandemic is in the past. We got some things right and some things wrong, but we survived. It’s in the rearview mirror for most Americans and they are looking forward, not back.
So why are Republicans bringing up COVID just before the midterm elections? Because they still haven’t engaged their base. They’ve essentially given up on trying to win swing voters. They’re now trying to mitigate the impact of the coming wave by reminding Republicans that they should still be mad.
The people who will determine the outcome of the election are focused on affordability — the price of groceries, gas, energy, and housing in particular. It’s too late for Republicans to win their support. Trump has doubled down on tariffs and wars and is getting the blame for the financial pinch hurting too many families.
To offset the loss of swing voters, Republicans are trying desperately to engage their base. That’s why we’re hearing so much about COVID, crime, and, to a lesser degree, immigration. The GOP hopes they can make less-engaged Republican voters angry enough to go to the polls. Right now, those voters are just as mad about prices and endless wars as everybody else.
As I’ve said before, wave elections happen when one party shows up, the swing voters side with them, and the other party stays home, disengaged and demoralized. Republicans are trying to prevent that third part of the wave. They need their base to go to the polls, even in a bad election year. That’s how they prevent districts that should be relatively safe from flipping to the other party.
In other words, COVID is a distraction. Crime is a bit more salient, but it’s still not among the top concerns of most voters — except Republicans. Immigration has been neutered as an issue for most voters because of the brutality of Trump’s enforcement, but it’s still a top priority for Republicans.
Two months before the election and Republicans are still talking to their base, ignoring the concerns of most Americans. Either that or they are engaged in a futile effort to change the national conversation. Regardless, the election is moving on without them.
And the attack ads will keep on coming
We're seeing this kind of thing locally. The Republican Alamance County Commissioners are digging in their heels over a widely unpopular movement by some Moms for Liberty types to ban or sticker any "woke" book they don't like and are chattering a lot about how "Marxism" has infiltrated the library and the public schools in some kind of bizarre, vague conspiracy.
The effort's being led by one Commissioner elected in the last election cycle that moved to Alamance in 2019. Before that, he spent his entire adult life since the 80s as a political operative and consultant for national and state level Republican political campaigns and PACs, like Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.
It's a pretty obvious ploy to try and drive turnout with their base.