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So a friend of mine who does work for the DNC – I spoke about her before, she worked for Hillary in Pennsylvania in 2016 and worked on the post mortem there – reached out o me after seeing my comments on shutdowns/COVID. She's doing a post mortem for the party in South Texas (1)
What they're finding down there is that the swing to Trump was not at all because of "socialism" or "the Squad" or even "Defund the Police," which was, she described "decently popular" down there.
It was lockdowns, with a dash of QAnon/Evangelicism. Here's what she said (2)
It was lockdowns, with a dash of QAnon/Evangelicism. Here's what she said (2)
South Texas was one of the hardest hit areas by #COVID in the summer. Texas didn't lockdown during the surge, but local authorities in border counties did. The result was that these places had total business shutdowns that caused massive unemployment, and also bad outbreaks (3)
She said one local political candidate who lost described it as "Being told to take dramatic precautions to keep your house from burning down, but then having it burn down anyway." People felt the lockdowns failed, and Republicans took advantage of that in messaging. (4)
"What's the argument when your house burns down anyway despite precautions? It could've burned down worse?" was what she was told. Democrats had also ignored warnings that the shutdowns were working against them because they assumed shutdowns were popular (5)
The assumptions were based on the fact that lockdowns had broad support in New York, New Jersey and Michigan in the Spring, and the party extrapolated that to anywhere that had bad outbreaks in the summer (Texas, Florida, Arizona), but that ended up not being the case. (6)
Basically a decent number of people in the Rio Grande Valley felt the lockdowns had failed, and they ended up with the worst of both worlds, and Republicans took advantage of it by saying "If Trump had his way, there would've been no shutdown at least" and that message worked (7)
The Democrats' counterargument was "the shutdown saved lives and we want to give you money," but that message flopped because it's hard to argue a nightmare could be worse and Republicans responded with "they want to give you $1200, I want to give you your job back" (8)
Basically, enough voters felt "if we were going to have a bad outbreak and a lot of death either way, we should've at least been given the option to stay open." There was also some resentment that other parts of Texas had less serious outbreaks with no shutdown (9)
There was some evidence of QAnon and Evangelicism getting out some Latinos for Trump, but the Democrats in the area had expected and planned for that. What surprised them was resistance to lockdowns and support for GOP on the COVID debate (10)
FWIW, the pro-GOP forces in the COVID got lost in exit polls because they were lumped in with “the economy.” Edison exit polls said 35 percent of voters listed “the economy” as their #1 issue and Trump won then 83-15
