As the washout from the 2022 US mid-term elections continues, everyone’s trying to read what they want to see in the entrails. It was a repudiation of Trump! It cleared the way for Trump to run in ’24! It was a victory for Joe Biden! It was a disaster for Joe Biden!
And so on.
But one thing does seem very clear: Americans rejected Covid fear-mongering and authoritarianism.
The Biden administration waited until after the mid-terms to quietly announce that it had extended the “public health emergency” declaration for another few months. So, from “15 days to flatten the curve”, Americans are now on 1000 days and counting of “public health emergency”. At the same time, Biden said last month that the pandemic is “over”.
Why are they saying one thing, while they sneakily do another?
Because they know that Americans, like everyone but the Mask Karen at your local Pak’n’Save, are simply over Covid. Not only are Americans walking away in droves from the Covid vaccines (less than 10 per cent have taken up the latest booster), but they’re voting in waves for the politicians who most openly rejected lockdowns.
The five state governors, including one Democrat, who opened up their states early in the pandemic enjoyed huge wins.
Leading the pack is certain presidential contender Ron DeSantis. Florida, the state he governs, became virtually synonymous with anti-lockdown policy. Despite incessant shrieking from the Branch Covidians, DeSantis not only ended state lockdown policies, but prevented individual cities from from enacting vaccine or mask mandates. DeSantis made his resistance to lockdown policies a centrepiece of his campaign.
“I lifted you up, I protected your rights, I made sure you could earn a living, I made sure you could operate your businesses,” he said in an October debate against his Democrat rival, Charlie Crist, who, by contrast said he would reintroduce mask mandates for the state’s 22 million people if the “experts” told him to.
But DeSantis won by almost 60 per cent of the vote, a state record, even in inner city parts of Florida that hadn’t voted Republican for a generation.
But Florida wasn’t the first state to open up. That honour went to Georgia and its governor, Brian Kemp.
In April 2020, Kemp, before any other jurisdiction and despite the vicious, hysterical fearmongering of “experts”, let shops including gyms, hairdressers, theatres and restaurants open their doors once again. It was, according to the left-leaning The Atlantic, “an experiment in human sacrifice”. Kemp clearly thought he made the right decision, otherwise he wouldn’t have spent the next two-and-a-half years reminding everyone of it, including a week before the midterms in his debate with Democrat Stacey Abrams, whom he roundly defeated for a second time.
Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s Republican governor, was damned by the mainstream media for presiding over a “state that doesn’t care if you live or die”, when she reopened in May 2020.
No surprises: Reynolds won a thumping re-election. So did Kristi Noem of South Dakota.
And don’t forget Jared Polis, governor of Colorado, who was easily re-elected last week, being the first Democrat-run state to reopen in 2020. “The public health toll and the economic toll of lockdowns [are] extensive,” Polis said in November 2020, when Victorians in Australia had just finished their second of seven lockdowns that would last 270 days.
Speaking of Victoria, Michigan and California re-elected their lockdown-brutal governors. The exception, once again, proves the rule. Michigan and California are Dandrewstan writ large: they’d robotically chant “I stand with [insert name]” no matter who was wearing the blue colours, or why.
Just to drive the point home, the anti-lockdown governors reaped a notable electoral premium.
In 2018, these five governors’ average margin of victory over their opponents was 3.7 percentage points. Last week, it was 18.1 percentage points.
The Australian
In 2021, politicians like Jacinda Ardern, or Australian state premiers Mark McGowan and Annastacia Palaszczuk reaped the benefit of Covid panic.
But now the panic is over and (most) voters have seen it for what it was, all three are tanking in the polls.
Which probably explains the snowballing efforts in all three jurisdictions to ramp up the fear factor about new Covid variants.
