Axios released a poll this morning that I’m still trying to fully digest. They went into the field and asked both vaccinated and unvaccinated people who they blame for the current surge in COVID cases.
You can guess who vaccinated people blame, right? Overwhelmingly they blame the unvaccinated, with a dollop of blame also going to Donald Trump and conservative media.
But who do you think the unvaccinated people blame?
No, really. I want you to guess.
You’ve got your theory?
Okay.
Well, the answer is:
Foreigners.
Yes, that’s right. Unvaccinated people blame, in descending order, foreigners and the mainstream media for the current wave of COVID. This is who they are.
There’s been a lot of told-you-so about COVID in Florida, where
things are pretty bad.
Case counts in Florida are at the highest level ever—worse than the darkest period of last winter. And this is with testing at a lower level than last winter. Hospitalizations are headed way up. The deaths will follow in a couple weeks. Here’s how it currently looks:
That’s right: 39,079 Floridians have died from COVID, so far. That’s the fourth biggest total of all the states. Right now, 58 people are dying every day in Florida and that number is going to get bigger.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that this is somehow bad for the political prospects of Ron DeSantis.
I disagree.
In fact, I would propose the exact opposite: The
worse things get in Florida, the better it is for DeSantis’s political future.
For a number of reasons:
- Every time DeSantis is criticized by the media, it helps him.
- Every additional death is evidence that he didn’t cave to “the lockdowns.”
- The more people who die on his watch, the greater a testament it is to his fidelity to the cause of modern conservatism. It proves that he’s not some RINO cuck like Mike DeWine.
- If people really believe that COVID is the fault of foreigners, then the bigger the death toll, the more aggrieved DeSantis can be by how these nefarious foreigners hurt his state.
Let me tell you, right now, what the line will be:
Nothing bad happened in Florida. It’s all just a bunch of lies from the liberal media who want to hurt Ron DeSantis. And if anything did happen, then DeSantis did what he did because he’s a patriot who believes in freedom and keeping the economy strong. And it wasn’t as bad as what Andrew Cuomo did. And it’s all the fault of foreigners.
Anyone who thinks that failure to manage COVID could hurt a Republican with political aspirations hasn’t been paying attention. If anything, the
opposite is true.
In the near term, Republican voters are going to be deeply suspicious of anyone who acted responsibly on COVID. And so the worse things get in Florida, the better it is for Ron DeSantis.