How will the culture war battle lines around coronavirus change if/when Biden is president?

[Mr. Morden]

Presently, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to consider coronavirus to be a serious problem that requires drastic measures to mitigate the spread.  Dems think Republicans are underhyping the threat while Republicans think Democrats are overhyping it.  Of course, tied up in this is the fact that the incumbent president is a Republican who's up for reelection, and if voters are faced with a pandemic + bad economy prompted by lockdowns, it's bad for Trump's reelection prospects.  Thus, each side thinks the other is not just wrong, but over/under hyping things because it benefits their side politically.

In principle, these incentives will change once Biden is president, though I'm not sure if it'll actually have much impact on people's desired policies.  What do you think?

(This assumes we still don't have a vaccine in January, and the daily death toll hasn't dropped significantly.)

[Saint Milei]

Biden will be more aggressive towards antifa and rioters. BLM won't be as strong as it is right now. The right will feel emboldened, but the right will also suffer. I think the culture war will be minimized and another quagmire will occur in 2022 during midterms

[PSOL]

A Biden presidency would most likely put a lot of the partisan attitudes around the pandemic be put to rest. Considering that Biden would hold the presidency, and with a more hypothetically favorable legislature in all levels of governance nationwide, the will and legal power of the Republican Party on this issue would cease to exist. The only reason why the pandemic became a partisan issue was due to Donald Trump’s insistence on denialism that everything was indeed spiraling out of control, and to please the base in making sure “the cattle” gets back to work. A loss of the presidency thus means the Democratic Party would have the power to better influence local and national policy.

[Ferguson97]

A lot of people will stop paying attention to politics altogether with a President Biden since he’s a return to normalcy.

[Del Tachi]

The timing is interesting, because no matter who is elected we're still approaching herd immunity.  There could be a lot less cases/deaths by next spring for that reason alone.  Without the backdrop of the election and Trump's press conferences/other musings, COVID just isn't as exciting of a story to cover in the media.

If Biden is elected and COVID stays an issue (plateau in deaths/cases, no vaccine), however, I fully expect the media to do a 180 and start talking about all the "context" that's missing from their reporting right now.  Talking heads will give Biden a pass because "we've expanded testing, so of course there's more cases!" and "very few young, healthy people are dying of the virus now!"  Basically parroting what Trump says now.

The cognitive dissonance will be deafening, no doubt

[Hope For A New Era]

No change. The left's "take it seriously" position will continue gaining strength extremely slowly, as it has been since the end of the spring surge.


Also, it wasn't Trump who created corona-polarization, it was Fox News.

Trump could have coasted to reelection, started selling red face masks that say MAGA on them, etc...but he decided to go along with the Fox nonsense, and he'll lose because of it.

[dead0man]

A lot of people will stop paying attention to politics altogether with a President Biden since he’s a return to normalcy.

oh what a lovely dream.  I'll believe it when I see it.



as for the OP, I predict there will be a lot less fear mongering of it.  Maybe the news will actually mention when cases drop.  The only way you can tell now (if you just watch TV news and go to news websites that match your politics) if rates go down is when they are NOT telling you rates are going up.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Isn't the concept perfectly ghastly?

[pikachu]

Biden's impending presidency is probably going to be less important than that we'll probably know if there's going to be a vaccine or not by Feb. 2021. That calms things down because either there's a light at the end of the tunnel or the country's back is broken after the very miserable winter we're about to have.