Democrat Terry McAuliffe can’t stop lying about COVID.
During his Sept. 28 gubernatorial debate with Republican Glenn Youngkin, McAuliffe claimed there were 8,000 new COVID cases “yesterday in Virginia.” The reality is there were less than 2,000.
Then on Oct. 7, McAuliffe claimed there were 1,142 children with COVID in ICU beds across Virginia. This was also way off. In reality, just 35 children visited a hospital for any COVID-related reason on Oct. 7, let alone were admitted to an ICU bed.
Contacted by the Washington Post to explain these discrepancies, the McAuliffe campaign claimed McAuliffe simply misspoke.
Except, he then “misspoke” again, making the same preposterous claim about children in ICU beds on Oct. 13, Oct, 21, and Oct. 23.
Why does McAuliffe keep “misspeaking” about the severity of COVID in Virginia and always in the direction of making the pandemic seem worse than it really is?
The answer is because Democrats chose to politicize COVID a long time ago, attempting to cast Republicans as soft-on-COVID villains. For example, in his Sept. 9 COVID address to the nation, Biden said:
Right now, local school officials are trying to keep children safe in a pandemic while their governor picks a fight with them and even threatens their salaries or their jobs. Talk about bullying in schools. If they’ll not help — if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as President to get them out of the way.
Never mind that the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has advised against mask mandates in schools, or that no European country mandates masks in schools, or that there is no corresponding wave of COVID cases among children in Europe.
You see why McAuliffe has to constantly lie about the danger COVID poses to school children?
The political attack on Youngkin for pursuing the same policy Europe has on masks in schools would have no salience if McAuliffe told the truth. Democrats have chosen a political playbook that forces them into lying about COVID numbers.
And these lies are dragging down Biden’s approval rating on his handling of the pandemic.
According to new Axios/Ipsos polling, Biden’s overall approval rating on handling the pandemic has fallen from 52% in January to 44% today. Republican approval of Biden on the pandemic has actually inched up from 17% to 18%.
Where Biden has collapsed is among independents (falling from 51% to 42%) and Democrats (falling from 86% to 71%).
Biden’s messaging is “focused on the wrong problem,” Ipsos president Cliff Young told Axios. “The problem is not the unvaccinated. The problem is convincing those who are vaccinated that they have the tools to navigate a COVID world … [and reassuring] those who’ve been vaccinated that they can live a normal life again … People are confused. There is no sense of what the endgame is.”
By choosing to make Republicans the villains of COVID, Democrats committed themselves to hyping the danger of COVID as McAuliffe is doing on a daily basis on the campaign trail. But by hyping the danger of COVID, Democrats have undermined their own base’s belief that Biden is effectively handling the pandemic.
Maybe if Democratic politicians stopped demonizing Republicans on COVID, then the independent and Democratic voters might feel as though their lives were actually getting better.
