A Frazzled America Staggers Into 2022

[Celerity]

The Omicron variant’s spread poses an unwelcome political conundrum just as election season begins. Democrats and the G.O.P. see reasons to hope, but the virus will get the deciding

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/us/politics/midterm-elections-coronavirus.html



Tough choices all around

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus struck at the most inconvenient time: just as millions of Americans were traveling for the Christmas and New Year holidays. Suddenly, family gatherings were once again shadowed by menace and risk of infection — but also by a new layer of uncertainty and confusion. All of which served to drive Americans to new heights of exhaustion with the toll the virus has taken on ordinary life. It remains a serious public health emergency, with daily coronavirus cases soaring into the hundreds of thousands.

But the pandemic also presents difficult political choices for elected officials, from President Biden on down, just as election season begins in earnest. Democrats could enter the 2022 midterms as the responsible grown-ups who finally tamed a deadly scourge. Or, if Republicans succeed in branding mask and vaccine mandates as nanny-state overreach, voters could punish them in the fall. Most likely, both narratives will compete for attention as the virus itself casts the determining vote. “Everyone up and down the chain is frustrated,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican messaging expert who has spent the last year conducting focus groups on the virus. “And it just doesn’t seem to end.”

Worn out, fed up and confused

There is no mistaking the signals that Americans are sending at this moment: A Monmouth University poll taken two weeks after Omicron was first detected in the United States found that six in 10 Americans said they were “worn out” by the pandemic, and nearly half said they were angry. Since January 2021, the public’s initial exuberance about the arrival of vaccines has curdled. More than 58 percent reported feeling “frustrated” about the status of Covid vaccinations in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll. A quarter said they were “confused.”

According to Gallup’s Covid tracking survey, optimism about the state of the pandemic reached 51 percent in October only to plummet to 31 percent in December. The percentage of Americans who said the situation had gotten worse shot up to 35 percent from 18 percent. But polls also show a deep divide between those vaccinated and not, and Omicron has barely budged the latter. “As a nation, we’re not experiencing the pandemic equally,” said [link:[e-mail]|Mollyann Brodie], who oversees polling for the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Science vs. impatience.......

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