Partisanship and geography- How elites talk about public health emergencies in the United States
Image: @cdc
By Scott L. Greer
On October 7th, US Vice-Presidential candidates sparred about whether the Obama administration's response to H1N1 was comparable to the debacle of the Trump administration response to COVID-19. Meanwhile, Hurricane Delta seemed set to hit the Louisiana coast, close to the same towns Hurricane Laura had devastated a few weeks earlier. It might be nice to imagine that disasters create unity, or that public health emergencies are beyond politics, but it is patently not the case. It is better to understand why and how the politics of public health emergencies work.
Phil Singer, Charley Willison and Scott L. Greer wrote in the Journal of Public Health Policy to present the findings of our research on how elites "cue" and frame public health emergencies. It follows on our earlier work on the politics of disease outbreaks and hurricanes, and is part of a larger project that studies the politics of American public health emergencies. We compared the politics of the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the 2016 Zika outbreak, focusing on how elites framed and discussed the issue.
We found that the politics of Ebola were partisan through and through. It was instrumentalized by Republican party politicians and media (notably Fox News) in order to argue that the incumbent Democratic president, Barack Obama, was not going his job well. Republican interest in the topic dissipated rapidly after the November 2014 elections. The politics of the 2016 Zika outbreak started out similarly partisan, with Republicans again using it as an opportunity to attack the Obama administration, but shifted towards a more bipartisan rhetoric and politics as it became clear that uncontrolled spread would cause problems for Republican constituencies along the Gulf coast. Florida hotelier Donald Trump, likewise, did not amplify Zika in the same way he did Ebola. Rather than using Zika as a way to attack Democrats, he chose to play it down and say that the Florida state government was doing well.
What might this mean for COVID-19? The Ebola experience of public health politics in the service of partisan politics is dispiriting, and elite cueing in the COVID-19 pandemic has been relatively partisan (though with less coherence, partly because the pandemic is not localized in the way the Zika and Ebola outbreaks were). It does suggest, though, that partisanship can be balanced by legislators' desire to help their districts- Zika had less value to Republicans as a cudgel against Obama than as a problem they could claim credit for solving.
One feature of American partisan polarization, among elites and voters, has been less and less responsiveness to actual changes in conditions, such as successful or failed public health policies. The tale of Zika offers some comfort: politicians do not just stake partisan positions. They still try to do things that will allow them to claim credit before voters.