Partisanship in Initial State Responses to the COVID‐19 Pandemic

• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Author: Michael K. Gusmano,Edward Alan Miller,Pamela Nadash,Elizabeth J. Simpson
• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.372

380

doi: 10.1002/wmh3.372

© 2020 Policy Studies Organization

Partisanship in Initial State Responses to the COVID‐19

Pandemic

Michael K. Gusmano , Edward Alan Miller , Pamela Nadash , and

Elizabeth J. Simpson

In this article, we review state policy responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic and argue that they were

driven primarily by partisan politics. Preliminary evidence suggests that the party affiliation of a

state's Governor was the most important factor shaping the nature and timing of the response. In

particular, we find that Republican Governors were less likely than their Democratic counterparts to

issue stay‐at‐home orders and, when they did issue them, were slower to do so. This finding is

consistent with a recent trend in U.S. health policy toward vertical partisan coalitions in which state

leaders align their policies with national party leaders even when those decisions may not be in the best

interest of their states or supported by a majority of their constituents. In this case, however, since

President Trump's response to the outbreak has been inconsistent, many Republican Governors

appear to be aligning their COVID‐19 responses with the national party's perceived rhetorical and

electoral enhancing goals of personal freedom and economic growth/recovery, rather than with

President.

KEY WORDS: COVID‐19, governors, state policy decisions, closures, political party

Introduction

Commenting on lessons from the 1995 Chicago heat wave, sociologist Eric

Klinenberg argued that disasters do for social scientists what particle accelerators do for

physicists—they speed up and make visible conditions that are always present but may

be less visible under normal circumstances (Urban Ominbus, 2013).TheCOVID‐19

pandemic has helped to lay bare some of the fundamental problems with the U.S.

economic, social, and political systems (North, 2020). The geographic and racial dis-

parities in deaths associated with COVID‐19 highlight blatant inequalities in health

status, access to health care, and trust in government and other social institutions. The

differences in the exposure to the virus by class highlight the health and economic

consequences of a society with a historic concentration of wealth. It is also revealing of

the nation's politics. In this essay, we discuss the extent to which state policy responses

to the outbreak has further exposed the depths of partisan division in the United States

and the consequences of President Trump's disdain for science.

The response of the Trump administration to the COVID‐19 pandemic is now

well‐chronicled by the news media (Lipton et al., 2020). For months after receiving

reports about the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, China, and the probability that