During COVID-19, Democrats secured for teachers unions in many locations an effective two-year, taxpayer-funded vacation from work — all at the expense of schoolchildren. This already proved devastating for liberal lawmakers in Virginia and New Jersey last year. According to a new poll from Politico, school mask mandates, the final stand of the COVID-iocracy, could prove just as politically painful come November.
Parents polled across the political spectrum overwhelmingly consider the school mask mandates imposed on their children to be either useless or actively harmful, with more than 2 in 5 claiming mask mandates harmed their children’s general schooling experiences and nearly half stating they didn’t help. Only 11% said the mandates helped schooling experiences.
In other words, four times as many parents believed mask mandates actively harmed their children’s schooling than believed it helped. That’s an election issue in the making.
Although Republicans and independents believed in greater numbers that the mandates caused harm, fewer than 1 in 5 Democrats claimed the mandates helped their children’s schooling experience overall.
Even when asked purely about the importance of mask-wearing in preventing children from contracting COVID-19 — not about the cost-benefit analysis of other factors, such as impaired mental health or socialization — Democrats stood alone in favoring continued mask-wearing. Nearly 3 in 4 Republicans and more than half of all independents said it was not necessary for children to wear masks to avoid contracting omicron or other variants of the virus. Seven in 10 Democrats said otherwise.
Even with the more deadly delta variant, the effect of age on the severity of COVID-19 was even greater than that of vaccination. Unvaccinated 18 year-olds had lower COVID-19 death rates than fully vaccinated 30-year-olds. Yet, many Democratic-dominated metropolitan jurisdictions decided to make schools the last bastion of safety-ism, with seemingly ceaseless indoor and outdoor masking requirements and classroom-wide quarantines.
However, in the public mind, the tide has rapidly turned against further coronavirus restrictions. School masking is only the penultimate domino — the last and biggest obstacle to normality is the lingering federal mask mandate on airlines and Amtraks. The question is whether the divide between parents demonstrated in the poll reflects mere local opinion or a lagging trend. The latter could prove as disastrous for Democrats with the parental vote as the school closures did in 2021.
