Philip Moniz
Though the coronavirus pandemic has killed over 500,000 people in the United States and 2.5 million worldwide, some people take it more seriously than others. Some perceive the death toll as an outrage and a failure of government leadership; others regard the toll as unfortunate but unavoidable; still others see it as tolerable, just part of the normal course of life on a populous globalized planet. Where do these perceptions come from? How do they relate to what political elites are saying? And what effects might they have on people’s attitudes toward preventive measures like social distancing?
Whether people are outraged at the virus’s impact on public health or at the government’s performance undoubtedly has something to do with which party they support. Partisans have long been known to see the world through the lens of their partisanship. They tend, for example, to see the economy as improving under their party’s leadership but worsening under that of the other party. Even when conditions are tracked and reported, as with the number of deaths from Covid-19, partisans may see the numbers in different ways. What seems like an unacceptably large number of deaths to one group may be less alarming to another. Badness is ambiguous. With this paper, I sought to test the hypothesis that President Trump’s rhetoric reduced how serious Republicans thought the death toll from Covid-19 was, improved their evaluations of his job performance, and decreased their support for social distancing. I also tested whether facts about the president’s pandemic preparation would counteract his rhetoric and make Republicans more critical of him.
To answer these questions, I conducted an experiment in early June 2020 with 1,600 online survey respondents all of whom identified as Republicans. The experiment had four conditions. In the baseline condition, participants read a headline on how many Covid-19 deaths had occurred by that time (it had just passed 200,000). In the Downplaying condition, I added an often-repeated line from the president that the death toll would have been 2.2 million had he not done the job that he was doing. By casting the current death toll against a potentially larger one, I expected participants would perceive the current one as less serious. In the Counter-Information condition, subjects read the president’s quote and a newspaper excerpt recounting how the Trump administration had hampered the government’s response by disbanding a pandemic-specific White House task force in 2018. I expected this treatment to make participants more disapproving of the president.
After reading the Downplaying treatment, participants reported the same levels of concern about the death toll, evaluation of the president, and support for social distancing as those in the control. In this experiment, the president’s rhetoric didn’t change people’s attitudes, but that does not mean that it had no effect in the real world beforehand. The results from the Counter-Information condition suggest that Republicans had already made up their minds by this time and were on the defensive. Participants who read that the president had hamstrung the government’s pandemic responsiveness expressed much less concern (7 percentage points) about the virus’s death toll and higher scores for the president’s job performance (5 percentage points). Perhaps reassuringly, the counter-information did not, however, alter their attitudes about social distancing.
From early on in the pandemic, Republicans across the country said they were less concerned about the virus than Democrats were, were less critical of President Trump’s job performance, and less intent on social distancing. This difference in opinion was important for public health as well as democratic accountability. Though Trump ultimately lost his bid for re-election, he seems to have convinced many Republicans that he did a laudable job in dealing with the pandemic. Not only this, but his rhetoric appears to have inoculated him against fact-based criticism, or at least this instance of it.