The COVID political backlash disappeared

Turns out the pandemic didn't break the Democratic Party

Voters blame Biden for a lot of things. But it turns out his handling of COVID isn’t one of them. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Welcome back to The Argument’s monthly poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our last surveys have asked about immigration, AI, and free speech. Our full crosstabs are available below the paywall in this post for paying subscribers and our full methodology can be read here.

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This was supposed to be a column about the lingering harm from the Democratic Party’s response to COVID-19.

It has become a familiar narrative: The Democratic Party did incalculable damage to its image, breaking the trust of voters at large and boosting the appeal of the Republican Party, which leveraged anti-establishment sentiment to surge back to power. From extended school closures to selective stay-at-home messaging that protected the left’s right to protest but scorned apolitical decisions to vacation, Democrats’ COVID policy was a political failure that alienated voters. Right?

It’s a convenient theory, and it’s one I subscribed to for many years. I was so confident in our poll validating it that I pitched Jerusalem about this column before I even got the results back: “The lasting damage COVID did to the Democratic Party’s image.”

The only problem is that our poll provided absolutely nothing to back this up. If anything, it suggested the opposite: Five years on from COVID, as partisan tensions have cooled, the public’s view of the issue remains extremely nuanced and complicated — just like the pandemic itself. But there’s little to suggest that Democrats are suffering from any long-term, lingering fallout.

When it comes to their handling of COVID, for instance, both parties were underwater. But Democrats (-6) fared considerably better than Republicans (-23). In fact, even though Joe Biden was the most unpopular president in our dataset, his ratings on COVID (-8) were significantly better than Donald Trump’s (-22).

Similarly, on what is widely understood to be Democrats’ biggest failure — school closures — an outright majority agreed that they were “largely necessary” in order to prevent infections.

This doesn’t mean that the public is giving American institutions a mulligan for every mistake they made during COVID. Across our survey, there are several flags that suggest serious, long-term consequences. For instance, a plurality of Americans believe that public health officials “often hide or distort information for political reasons.”

There also doesn’t seem to be much consensus on what to do in the event of another pandemic, nor is there much of an appetite to bring back the measures taken during COVID. Even the most popular measure tested — government investment in vaccine trials and production¹ — hit just 54% approval. Despite a majority agreeing that the initial school closures were necessary, only 39% of people said they would support mandatory ones in the future, while just 43% said they would support restrictions on indoor dining and bars.

In other words, Americans may understand the complexities and trade-offs that necessitated the COVID-era restrictions. But they wouldn’t be willing to do them again.

Potentially complicating the response to another pandemic is the widespread creep of anti-vaccination views. For example, in our survey, 42% of respondents said they believe that the side effects of vaccines outweigh the benefits.

And after decades of false claims concerning vaccination and autism — a fiction that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has actively promoted — a full 45% of Americans now believe that there has been “too little research” concerning any potential link. An optimistic reading is that a plurality of the country is simply in favor of more research into all scientific questions; a more realistic one is that Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again movement have provided the only compelling theory² thus far for the rise in autism.

If there is a bright side, it’s this: Despite the rise in skepticism, there still isn’t much of an appetite for the Trump Administration’s more explicit attacks on vaccination and vaccine mandates in America.

For example, very few people want to undo the childhood vaccination schedule. Over three-quarters of Americans said they would be likely to recommend that their friends and family follow the recommended childhood vaccination schedule, if asked.

Meanwhile, 80% of Americans opposed ending the school requirements for vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella. And despite the conservative uproar over vaccine mandates in the workplace, it’s still an issue that Americans are roughly evenly split on.

In other words, five years on from COVID, there is no single overarching sentiment that characterizes American views on the government response to the pandemic. What is true, however, is that any lingering electoral consequences for Democrats don’t seem to be present any longer. In fact, when it comes to the topic of personal health, the Democratic Party currently holds a trust advantage over the Republican Party.

So much for my prewritten column.

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COVID is now an afterthought

Readers may remember California Gov. Gavin Newsom attending a fancy dinner at a boutique restaurant called The French Laundry, in direct violation of his own statewide pandemic protocols. The incident caused an immense uproar and was the catalyst for a (deeply unsuccessful) recall effort against him.

It didn’t end (or even appear to hurt) his career. If anything, the recall effort gave the governor a national profile, which he deftly built upon with his response to Texas’ redistricting efforts. Widely considered the next Democratic front-runner, Newsom currently holds a big edge over JD Vance in our poll for a potential 2028 presidential matchup.

Among registered voters, Newsom leads by 7.2 percentage points. This actually means he’s outrunning congressional Democrats, who led by six percentage points among registered voters.

You might think it’s because Newsom is a television darling, but I’m not so sure it’s that simple. Newsom is actually cleaning up among the “disengaged” voters that Democrats have been struggling with lately. For instance, let’s take a look at independents who don’t watch cable television.³ This is one of the flakiest demographics in America; according to our survey, 35% of these voters didn’t even vote for a major-party presidential candidate in 2024.

Newsom leads this group by 28 percentage points.⁴ In fact, his lead actually exceeded the margin of congressional Democrats — these voters are D+25 at the congressional level, but D+28 in a Newsom-Vance matchup. Combined with the generic ballot findings we flagged yesterday, it seems reasonable to say that the recent Republican edge with low-propensity voters may well be eroding in upcoming elections, especially without Trump on the ballot.

It’s too early to draw any sweeping conclusions from the data we have, but it’s still interesting to see where Newsom outran Democrats (or, alternatively, where Vance underran Republicans) the most in our poll. While most subgroups are quite similar, the gender gap is notably smaller when two men are running against each other. Newsom performs noticeably better than congressional Democrats do with men, but he does slightly worse with women.

I guess that’s not unexpected.

Methodology notes

Our poll was fielded between Nov. 10 and 17, 2025, and surveyed 1,508 registered voters across the nation. The sample was weighted to be representative of the universe of registered voters in the United States by race; age; gender; education; census region; race by gender; age by gender; race by education; modeled presidential partisanship by race, age, and gender; and 2024 vote choice. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The design effect of the survey, which measures the loss of statistical precision due to weighting and design, was 1.10. Accounting for the design effect, the full margin of error was plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

This survey was designed and weighted by The Argument. Data collection was performed by Verasight, and voter file data and weighting targets were obtained from Catalist. A full methodology statement is available on the last page of the survey PDF. A detailed explanation on how our surveys work is available here.

Thanks to Josh Kalla, Amanda Iovino, and Carroll Doherty for reviewing this month’s polling language. As part of The Argument’s polling advisory committee, these experts have provided comments to ensure the rigor and objectivity of this polling project. They are not responsible for the ultimate language choices made by The Argument, and all errors are our own.

Correction: An earlier version of the school closures graph in this article had incorrect question wording. The graph has been updated.