Pandemic, Governors, and Public Opinion: The Effect of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths on Public Support for America’s Governors

Abstract A longstanding literature in American foreign policy holds that the American public’s support for war significantly depends on the number of U.S. casualties in the conflict (their number, rate, trend, proximity, etc.). While a pandemic is clearly not a war, many observers and political leaders have characterized the U.S. public policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic using the metaphor of wartime. This raises the question of whether such characterizations are more than mere metaphor. Has the American public’s response to pandemic-related casualties—cases and deaths—followed similar patterns to those found in the literature on public opinion and war? In this study, we assess the public’s responsiveness to COVID-19 casualties at different stages in the pandemic. Utilizing two large, 50-state surveys conducted during the two largest COVID surges, in winter 2021 and winter 2022, we test several hypotheses from the public opinion and war literature, including that proximity—spatial and temporal—influences public responses and that the public becomes desensitized to casualties over time. We find that in many respects, the public’s response to the pandemic does indeed mirror the patterns found with respect to public opinion and war.