By now it's well-established that enthusiasm for the COVID-19 vaccines is split along partisan lines. A new NBC News poll shows that 88 percent of Democrats have gotten their shots, compared to just 55 percent of Republicans. Liberals have mostly patted themselves on the back for this state of affairs amid increasing frustration with their unvaxxed neighbors as the pandemic continues to rage.
But what if the vaccines had become widely available before the 2020 presidential election, instead of right after?
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The skepticism found its way to the campaign trail. Then-candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both expressed mistrust. "Let me be clear: I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don't trust Donald Trump," Biden said in September 2020. Other Trump critics piled on. "Trump's vaccine can't be trusted," a Foreign Policy headline blared the same month. "If a vaccine comes out before the election, there are very good reasons not to take it." A poll taken six weeks before Election Day showed 52 percent of Americans — and 88 percent of Democrats — didn't trust Trump on the issue.
I didn't trust Trump on the issue, either. And I've wondered if I would have been so eager to get my shots if he had been in power when they became available to me.
While we all like to think we're rational individuals, it's also true that political polarization often drives our beliefs instead of the other way around. Before the pandemic, anti-vaccination sentiment was picking up steam and could be found on both the left and right. "Maybe it's not about vaccines, but about who's in power," the sociologist Charles McCoy wrote in 2019. That suggests we liberals might temper our rage at the unvaxxed with a little knowledge of our own fallibility. It's easy to envision a scenario in which more Republicans and fewer Democrats would have been vaccinated by now, if only Trump had got his way.
-
Is Trump a lame duck president?Talking Points Republicans are considering a post-Trump future
-
Has Zohran Mamdani shown the Democrats how to win again?Today’s Big Question New York City mayoral election touted as victory for left-wing populists but moderate centrist wins elsewhere present more complex path for Democratic Party
-
Nick Fuentes’ Groyper antisemitism is splitting the rightTalking Points Interview with Tucker Carlson draws conservative backlash
-
Is Mike Johnson rendering the House ‘irrelevant’?Talking Points Speaker has put the House on indefinite hiatus
-
Will Republicans kill the filibuster to end the shutdown?Talking Points GOP officials contemplate the ‘nuclear option’
-
Millions turn out for anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ ralliesSpeed Read An estimated 7 million people participated, 2 million more than at the first ‘No Kings’ protest in June
-
Are inflatable costumes and naked bike rides helping or hurting ICE protests?Talking Points Trump administration efforts to portray Portland and Chicago as dystopian war zones have been met with dancing frogs, bare butts and a growing movement to mock MAGA doomsaying
-
Graphic videos of Charlie Kirk’s death renew debate over online censorshipTalking Points Social media ‘promises unfiltered access, but without guarantees of truth and without protection from harm’
