More truth in this than a lot of people will want to admit! https://t.co/Bh88NC3SWi
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 27, 2020
Maybe I'm having a Poe's Law moment and interpreting mockery as these tweeters' sincere beliefs, but I think they both mean what they're saying. And they're wrong.
The first part of what Dreyfuss predicts is what right-wingers believe will happen -- that we liberals are in a massive conspiracy to fake fear about the coronavirus, and we'll drop the act as soon as the votes are counted. Either that or the right believes we're just sheeple blindly following the advice of the real hoaxers, Fauci, Gates, the WHO, Democratic politicians, the mainstream media, and the rest of the Deep State. (I guess all the people who died in Italy, Spain, and New York City in the spring were crisis actors.)
I can see Biden voters doing some non-socially-distanced celebrating if he wins, but folks on our side have never been perfect in our observance of public health guidelines. We've demonstrated for racial justice in ways that haven't always been 100% safe. Many of us, especially the young, went to a bar or two when they reopened.
But the rest of us don't believe Biden's election will make the pandemic go away. Assuming there's no vaccine before January 20, we don't think his presidency will cause the virus to magically vanish. Maybe Biden's plan will crush the curve while we wait for a vaccine -- maybe he'll be Andrew Cuomo, in other words. But we don't know that yet. (And if Democrats don't take the Senate, we can assume that Mitch McConnell will thwart as many of Biden's public health initiatives as he can.)
And the red states are never, ever going to lock down. That will be a big problem for Biden if he's president. The first culture-war battle of his presidency could easily be Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem engaging in massive resistance to every public health measure Biden proposes, as Fox News cheers them on.
It's facile to say that the parties will reverse positions on the pandemic if the White House changes hands. In all likelihood, everyone will just remain dug in.
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