Republicans kill people as an election strategy. We must call out their acts for what they are, a premeditated first degree murder conspiracy to keep Biden in a COVID quagmire and make Democrats more vulnerable in the midterms and beyond.
Consider if Trump won
My position may sound extreme, but consider this hypothetical—what if Trump won the election? Setting aside how incompetent and biased a Trump administration vaccine program would be, do you see any Republican leader questioning the vaccine if Trump was president? Vaccination would become a patriotic duty. There would still be resistance, but plenty of Republican trusted messengers, who are near-silent today, would promote the vaccine aggressively. The problem would be blue states not getting vaccines as readily as red ones, but this a digression.
1st Degree Murder for Power
GOP leadership is not playing to a base, but has weaponized the authoritarian voters it has cultivated since Reagan and thrown them into the trenches to die in waves. There is no other explanation. Republican leadership’s worst nightmare was Biden coming into office January 2021, getting the country fully-vaccinated and everyone living happily ever after. So oppose mask mandates. Ban vaccine requirements. Attack public health leaders. Give vaccine resisters unemployment if they are fired. Throw dead bodies into the system and scorch the earth to slow the advance.
Killing Republican voters does not impact the election map as far a Congress and state legislatures are concerned. You could kill off a third of Idaho and the state would still send Republicans to Congress and vote for the Republican president. Same for every deep red state. So there is no net legislative loss to the GOP, but the economy remains pandemically-mired and Biden faces an increasingly frustrated electorate for the midterms and beyond.
Trump and swing state Red Death
So why did Trump sound so pro-vaccine with Candice Owens? My conjecture is as vaccination rates have gone up, COVID is killing proportionally more Republicans now than the spring, when everyone could not get a shot, or early in the pandemic when urban minorities in blue states were the hardest hit. Today, COVID voter death is nearly an exclusively Republican affair and a looming net vote loss for the GOP when swing states are considered.
For example, there are over 28,000 COVID deaths in Michigan to date. Right now, the seven-day average is 106 deaths per day. Most of those are Republican voters at this point. So while Republicans politicians in federal and state legislatures are safe behind their gerrymandered district walls, losing voters at this rate may well affect presidential races in swing states.
While Trump is no four-dimensional strategy genius, he does polling and his pollsters likely presented this problem to him. He needs slow the loss. But Trump is boxed in by his voters’ current sentiments, so his efforts will be appearances like those with Owens, or the clip from the Bill O'Reilly event. Trump will ease into the language that will work with his base. Might be too late, but this is the only reason anyone in GOP leadership would care.
It Is Murder
The GOP created a monstrous engine of death for political gain. Republican leaders have agency and chose to resist vaccines and public health requirements, not out of fear of the base, but to kill the base with callous disregard for the short-term political gain of not giving Biden a win and taking back the reins of power. We could have had so many millions more vaccinated and boosted even, so the Omicron variant would be less of a concern, but for the political acts of Republicans scheming to get back into control.
We need to call this what it is. Murder.
Source for the graphic is here. Edited only to condense.