This is the CARES election
Voters are holding our government to the standard it set when it helped us get through Covid.
Sometimes you just know when a moment is going to stick with you, and when I read this quote today in the Washington Post I immediately realized that this is how I’ll remember the 2024 presidential election. Taylor is ostensibly responding to last night’s Vice Presidential debate — but what she is actually responding to, of course, is the end of the welfare expansions launched at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. In March 2020, Trump signed into law the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) which, among other things, required states to keep Medicaid recipients on the rolls during the emergency. But under Biden that requirement finally expired and millions of Medicaid recipients like Taylor were kicked out of the program.
It seems naive to imagine that anything short of a once-in-a-lifetime disaster of Covid’s magnitude would convince Trump to pass anything like the FFCRA again. But that act plainly set the bar for voters like Taylor, and that, I have argued, is why voters have been decidedly unimpressed by the Biden economy. Despite all kinds of positive indicators — low unemployment, slowing inflation, and a healthy GDP — the achievements of Bidenomics have simply paled in comparison to the temporary relief the working class found from legislation like the FFCRA. And don’t forget the CARES Act, which drove poverty to a historic low:
That’s the first thing I’ll remember about this election: voters straying to Trump simply because — right or wrong — they blamed Biden for the end of Covidfare.
The second thing I’ll remember: reactions to Covidfare voters like this. I won’t try to round up all of the terrible reactions to Taylor in that thread, but they generally fall into a few categories:
A decade ago, the standard objection here would have been that Biden wanted to save Taylor’s Medicaid expansion but was thwarted by Republicans and Joe Manchin. That’s not true — in this case, Biden pointedly avoided even criticizing states for terminating the program — but it’s what Democratic loyalists would have said.
What strikes me about this thread is that in 2024 no one is blaming Manchin. Instead, the standard response is to perform a total lack of sympathy for Taylor and her situation, scold her for being an idiot, and even indulge in the hard-right framing that uninsured parasites need to get to work. It’s the odious response of a base that has either abandoned any commitment it ever had to universal healthcare or — more plausibly — never had one in the first place.
If this is the CARES election, voters like Taylor are going to see stuff like this and rightly conclude that Democrats don’t care about them at all. Nearly a decade ago, building his campaign around the central demand for Medicare for All won Sanders a level of support that no one in the country anticipated. Today the fight for Medicare for All has been all but forgotten, at least among most of our political class. And in threads like this one, online Democratic activists meet the notion that health care is a human right that Americans should demand with overt hostility.