Peter Nicholas writes:

Defeating the pandemic may matter more politically than passing any bill. Last week, I observed a focus group made up of five white women, three of whom voted for Biden in 2020, the other two for Trump. How much do you follow news about the pandemic? the moderator asked. “It’s literally the first thing that everybody talks about,” said an independent voter from the Atlanta suburbs who backed Trump in 2016 and then switched to Biden in 2020.

Normally, the economy decides elections. Right now, though, the economy and the pandemic are so tightly interwoven that they’ll be virtually indistinguishable when voters go to the polls in 2022 and 2024. At the height of last year’s lockdown, jobless claims jumped from about 2 million to more than 23 million. Airline travel and hotel bookings plunged. The economy has since rebounded, though momentum was cut in half this summer as the Delta variant took hold. “If we want to have a robust and sustainable economic recovery over the next few years, we really need to get rid of this COVID crisis,” Gregory Daco, the chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, a macroeconomic forecasting firm, told me. The president’s new vaccine mandates, and the looming expansion of vaccination to young kids, may help.

Taming the pandemic will require perseverance on Biden’s part. He’ll need to hold firm if Republican governors follow through on threats to file lawsuits over his large-scale vaccine-mandate initiative. And he’ll have to be patient: with poll numbers that may continue to slide until the pandemic ebbs, and with Democratic lawmakers who might be tempted to distance themselves from him until his approval rating recovers. Speaking to reporters last week at the White House, Biden said he’s still taking a long view. “This is a process,” he said. “And it’s going to go up and down. That’s why I don’t look at the polls.” (Does anyone really buy that? In a news conference in June, Biden mentioned “polling data” that showed people trust him.)

In both the midterms and the 2024 presidential race, Republicans plan to frame Biden’s response to the pandemic in a larger narrative that questions his administration’s basic competence. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina laid out the argument last week as he left the Senate chamber: Just as the Biden administration waffled on the need to wear masks indoors, it also appeared blindsided by the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan following the U.S. troop withdrawal, Graham said. Americans are left confused, he told me. “There’s a combination of issues coming into play where there seems to be a lack of capability and competency,” Graham said. “That’s his biggest problem right now. You say one thing one day about COVID, and the next day you say something else. You tell us the Taliban are not going to take over, and they do.” The GOP critique could well prove convincing to voters. But it also offers an opportunity to Biden, and one that meshes with his apparent strategy: End the pandemic, and he neutralizes the Republicans’ attacks on him—perhaps fatally. [Continue reading…]