It'll hurt the Democrats. People are naturally libertarian, they don't like having their freedoms taken away, and the siege mentality simply has to end at some point.
I've criticized my governor at length, but he's right on the fact that a mask mandate
feels more like a punishment than a health measure. The fact of the matter is that we were told that vaccination meant we could go back to normal and live our lives without a mask, and because of the Ligma variant or whatever we have to mask up.
It's also very contradictory with society's return to normalcy. Biden says we're normal enough to get gouged on our loan interest rates again, and they say we're normal enough to where we have to spend hours of our day in traffic instead of working from home. But we're far away enough from normal that we have to still adhere to protocols again, even though we did the right thing.
And we haven't even gotten into a discussion about the lunacy in places like Oregon and
Brookline, MA, where liberals are outright defying the science they claimed to revere. Or many public schools, which would rather
restrict children's social interaction, or college campuses that are
banning indoor dining and snacking in class. It's amazing that we lost one blue-state governorship, nearly lost another, and Democrats are
still doubling down on statism.
Of course, if a business wants to put up a mask or vaccine mandate, more power to them. As long as they aren't draconian about it, they won't lose my business. But the government taking people's freedom of choice away from them doesn't end well. In liberals' case, these steps are often to give off the
appearance of security, rather than security itself. For all the talk about The Squad and how their messaging hurt Democrats downballot, the establishment is curiously silent on their COVID policies creating a Republican wave.
