Workers most exposed will decide the election

COMMENTARY livelihoods depend on constant personal interactions that place them at continual risk. So it stands to reason that lockdowns, cushioned by effective financial help and the hope that things will soon return to normal (or semi-normal), should enjoy their support.

Politically speaking, that case seems to be working. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that Democratic governors associated with some of the tougher lockdown measures — Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania; Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan — have approval ratings north of 70%. By contrast, Republican Brian Kemp, the Georgia governor prominently associated with lifting the lockdown, is at 39%.

But the Democratic case rests on some large assumptions.

One assumption is that COVID-19 is containable and will eventually be curable. If it isn’t, what are the lockdowns really achieving, other than delaying the march toward herd immunity while imposing ruinous costs on those least able to afford them?

Another is that the lockdowns are the economic equivalent of a medically induced coma. But what if they’re really a form of politically induced necrosis, killing jobs and businesses that will never come back?

A third is that the balance of public sympathy will rest with the comparatively small numbers of acute COVID-19 sufferers. But what happens when their numbers are dwarfed by those suffering from awful personal hardship?

One additional factor: The people making so many of the key decisions on how and when the lockdowns end (or may be resumed) are not themselves members of the Exposed class. When Whitmer joined ABC’s “The View” from what looked like a comfortable home to describe some anti-lockdown demonstrators as “racist and misogynistic,” she reminded voters of the yawning gulf between the Remote and the Exposed — or, as Noonan put it, between those who get to make policy and those who have to live in it.

Even now, many Democrats think (and I’m sometimes inclined to agree) that they will be able to win this fall on the strength of Trump’s catastrophic failures in managing the crisis. But Trump’s political stockin-trade is resentment, above all toward those who mistake their good luck for superior merit, or confuse virtue signaling with wise policy, or who impose policies on others without fully feeling the effects themselves.

After the 2016 election, there was a flurry of liberal interest in trying to understand those voters who gave the presidency to Trump. Here’s the short answer: People don’t take kindly to being scolded by those they blame for messing up their lives in the name of some greater good. Those who think the world can be run by remote control will have their folly exposed to failure by those who know it can’t.