Personally, I think there would've been less death, but not dramatically less.
At the end of the day, Republicans and Dems are both capitalist and answer to the same overlords, so they still wouldn't have done what actually needed to be done to properly handle it (AKA do what China did).
If it were Hillary Clinton president in March 2020 we would have had, like, maybe 2/3 as many deaths, one time checks of $1500, and then the largest GOP electoral landslide of our lives that fall.
I don't think it's really [possible for fewer CHUDs to be wearing masks right now...
On the one hand my knee-jerk reaction is to say that they would have acted sooner but I'm not completely convinced. At the very beginning Democrats were saying that people shouldn't change their lifestyle. Fauci was saying that well into April. I don't know if he would have acted differently under Dems. I can see them be paralyzed over fear of being criticized by Republicans like Obama was and being too slow because of it.
I don't know if they would have done actual lockdowns. Again, I think the criticism and the open-up protests would have been even worse. I can see them doing tepid curfews and stuff like that. I don't know if they would have actually done a real mask mandate either, Biden sure as fuck didn't. Plus their hero epidemic adviser would probably have still flip-flopped on mask usage.
Vaccines started being made earlier than people think. I don't think that would change with who's in charge. You're pretty much at the mercy of the drug companies. Dems absolutely would not work with China or Cuba or other countries on sharing vaccine info. Because they're not doing that now. They also wouldn't have did any nationalization or serious intervention in rollout, because they're not doing that now. Biden did pretty much the same shit Trump was doing by having CEOs handle everything. The only real difference is that this time I see FEMA and National Guard is actually doing vaccine drives in addition to private companies. So I guess that's something.
I'm just not convinced Hillary or Biden would have been much better. I think they probably would have been a little faster with aid, depending on what congress looked like. But it's important to note that Pelosi didn't want to do the $1200 at first. She argued $600 way back then. So who knows we might have gotten even less. That's not to credit Trump, I think getting $1200 was largely a fluke of circumstance. They all wanted $600 because that's what Bush did and that still was most reasonable to these ghouls. And, once again, we can see what's happening now as an indicator. Dem's could have easily did $3000 checks this round and had the exact same number of votes in the House and Senate. The talked it down to $1400 for bipartisanship and then got no votes from Republicans. That probably would have happened if they were in charge this whole time too.
We have statistics that show Democrat led states have done better overall than Republican led states. Going just off that, the answer could likely be yes they would have done better.
But that also poses a question, is it the chicken or the egg? Are Democrat governers actually doing anything significantly different on their own, or is it just that their states population was more likely to wear masks and social distance and believe in Covid from the start?
Another big question there of course is whether or not the Dems would have been as hardlined on Covid if they didn't have the GOP opposition. I could totally see a lot of them fapping about going "Well we don't really know yet, don't want to disrupt people" and refusing to make up their minds if they didn't have an enemy to focus that on and paint themselves as opposites of.
Also, we've seen already that even with lockdowns people who want to ignore it will generally just ignore it. Mask mandates have the same thing, people who want to not wear one simply don't and the police (who are anti mask) wont enforce most of this same as most corporations who don't care if they expose their employees or other customers.
Now that's not to say it would have no impact, I'm sure there's quite a few Covid deniers who wear masks just because "obeying the law" is more important to them, but there's still going to be largely significant amounts who don't. Same with how lockdowns do stop people from traveling and going out for business reasons more, even if they're perfectly fine going out to their family or friends or the few open restaurants/stores without any protection or care.
So I think it would certainly be better, but probably still bad enough that we'd remain the laughing stock of the world when it comes to Covid.
Materially probably the same , the optics and media spin would have been different.
Our healthcare system is designed from top to bottom for profit. Hospitals get built where it is most profitable. Excess capacity is liquidated in favor of just in time supply chains. Patients are treated like boxes in an Amazon warehouse. It was destined to be a disaster no matter who was in charge.
I'd say it's probably be better in blue regions and worse in red regions due to political polarization being driven into overdrive with compensation on both sides.
The blues would be more insufferable but would've taken the pandemic more seriously in the initial stages, and the reds would probably dive from the conspiracy-minded stuff they're at now to open hog rebellion at the naked attempt of the communists to take away their freedom to eat at the cheesecake factory.
my guess would be the like mostly same a bit less death maybe the republicans would be even harder on not taking the vaccine or using mask and stuff because they don't want to do something clinton told, also if Cuomo is anything to go by it could be just worse too because the media would not care as much
Definitely better but it’d still be a major pandemic.
Canada and France have libs in charge and it’s not like they did amazing. NZ did a good job but they’re also an island.
I'm not sure how different things would've been, really. Around the globe, the only thing that really impacted deaths and the spread of the illness were:
- the willingness to do hard lock downs earlier
- the willingness to do mass contact tracing early on (kinda useless after a certain point with intense community spread, but extremely helpful early)
- the willingness to shut down travel early
- not fucking around with long term nursing homes and seniors and protecting them as much as possible
- the ability to take control of production and mass distribute PPE, food, and block evictions, hand out cash, and so on.
Dems and GOP were in bipartisan opposition to all of these, didn't matter the state. Dems may have feigned support to do hard lock downs but then blamed GOP opposition, even if they somehow had 60 senators. Clinton or Biden wouldn't have used the Defence Production Act to control PPE production and logistics or to produce ventilators. Healthcare is such a shit show in this country that contract tracing would have been a complete mess and usless without major reforms. There's no worker protections and some half-thought quickly shitted out protections like ensured paid sick leave (if the Dems would've somehow been amenable to that) would've been ignored by the employers.
I don't think they would have mishandled the very early days and probably would have had a better initial response which would've helped prevent some of the exponential growth. But even if you're a country like France led by a neolib, it didn't seem to matter unless you were going to do the 5 above. There would probably be at least 100K fewer dead Americans but we'd still have all the problems we're having right now.
I'm not sure what they would've done to shave off that 100k? The whole mask thing would've happened anyway for reasons you list.
Despite the obvious difference in healthcare systems, I think the U.K. could serve as an instructive example of another country I with a center-right government that “believes the science”’ (that is albeit still to the left of the Democrats).
Fauci probably would have still told people not to wear masks at the outset, the conspiracy theories would’ve been even worse, there would be no furlough payments…it’s entirely possible the death rate could be even higher than it is now, too.
We would have reacted more quickly and competently but it wouldn't have changed much, since we never would have done the lockdown/testing/border control necessary to get the virus under control, and chuds will be chuds.
