Democrat Jennifer Loughran spent the early days of the pandemic sewing face masks for neighbors. Last month, as a newly elected member of the school board, he voted in favor of removing the district’s mandate with a mask. That was four months after he voted in favor of the state’s Republican nominee for governor. After months of political identity crisis, Ms Loughran decided that her opposition to her party’s mask orders, financial constraints and school closure policies had offset her support for climate change positions, abortions and rights. homosexuals, at least for the time being. Seeing her daughter left behind in the virtual kindergarten, Ms. Loughran was so frustrated, not knowing when her children would return to class, that she joined a group that attracted right-wing parents to push her to reopen the school. She was unhappy that Gov. Phil Murphy did not fight to reopen schools earlier and linked fellow Democrats to masked orders and restrictions. It has not decided which party to choose this fall in the local House race, a contest that is expected to help determine control of Congress. “All I know,” he said, “is that my party-based vote should no longer be taken for granted.” The ouster of loyal voters like Ms. Logran — along with the disapproval of independents — is among the challenges Democrats face in trying to maintain control of Congress and win state-level races in the November midterm elections. These voters say Democratic officials have left restrictions on the pandemic for too long and mishandled the health crisis, with devastating consequences for their children, while Republicans have generally pushed to minimize school closures and keep the economy open. . Kindergarten students sit in their classroom on the first day of personal learning at Maurice Sendak Elementary School in Los Angeles, Tuesday, April 13, 2021. More than a year after the pandemic forced all California schools to close their classrooms, some of the largest The state’s school districts are slowly reopening this week for in-person teaching. ((AP Photo / Jae C. Hong)) The ruling party usually wins by-elections in the first term of a president. Public opinion polls show that the trend remains stable. A Wall Street Journal poll in March found that 46 percent of U.S. voters plan to support Republican candidates in Congress, while 41 percent support Democrats. Regarding the pandemic, the Journal poll showed that voters believed Democrats could better control the pandemic by 9 percentage points. But that dropped from 16 points just four months earlier. At the regional level, one of the most significant declines in the party’s approval for pandemic management was in the Northeast, where the 30-point lead for Democrats in November had fallen to 20 points last month, according to a Journal poll. The drop is mainly due to independents, among whom the party’s 12-point advantage in the previous poll had evaporated. In the new poll, independent voters were divided 29% to 29% over which party was better able to handle Covid-19. THE OLDEST TYPE OF AMERICA NATIONAL PARK, 100 RETIRED: “EXCITING AND FULFILLING” CAREER Mrs. Loughran, a 45-year-old red-haired skateboard instructor with a blue-collar upbringing, threw an Obama-Maiden sign on the grass of her suburban home and gave up a handmade placard at the New York Women’s March during the First Year. of the term of President Donald Trump. Her faith in the party began to erode during the lockdown as she and her husband, Michael Loughran, tricked her eldest daughter’s virtual kindergarten, an infant with countless hours of iPad, and an infant diagnosed with a deadly genetic disorder. . Her vote for Jack Siatarelli as governor of New Jersey was the first time she had backed a Republican in a state or federal county. The change in the New Jersey constituency last fall shocked the political establishment and nearly cost incumbent Murphy a second term. Mr Murphy’s advisers said the campaign underestimated Covid’s frustration within the Democratic Party. After the election, in focus groups organized by Mr. Murphy’s team to better understand why the race was so close, Democratic voters expressed their pandemic exhaustion, councilors said. The governor has taken steps to address this exhaustion. Mr Murphy, who has advocated for tougher measures to curb Covid’s spread, was the first of many Democratic governors to lift mask orders across the state. “We still have people in the hospital in New Jersey, so it’s not like we’re at zero,” Murphy said. “But there is just tremendous fatigue. And we try to respond to the moment without overcoming it or underestimating it.” Mr Ciattarelli, in the wake of the campaign, said the governor should have done more to make the vaccine available to teachers sooner and reopen schools more quickly. Mr Ciattarelli said in an interview that he would not have come so close to victory without the support of Democrats and independent voters, and he felt that part of that support was rooted in pandemic fatigue. In the Virginia Gov.’s competition, Glenn Youngkin made parental involvement in schools a top issue and became the first Republican to win a seat in 12 years. His first major legislative act as governor was to terminate the state mandate in schools. FILE – Students walk through the classroom amid the COVID-19 pandemic at Washington Elementary School, Jan. 12, 2022, in Lynwood, California. The governors of California, Oregon and Washington have announced that students will no longer be required to wear masks from March 12. 2022. The governors of the three states announced the measure in a joint statement as part of new policies for indoor masks coming as coronavirus cases and hospitalization rates fall in the West Coast. (AP Photo / Marcio Jose Sanchez, Archive) Democratic voters widely support tackling their party’s pandemic. In a March poll by Rutgers University, 52% of voters rated Governor Murphy’s response to Covid as “A” or “B,” the highest score for any of the 11 questions polled. In the newspaper’s national poll, 49% of voters said they approved of Biden’s handling of the virus, among the highest acceptance scores on a list of topics included in the survey. Ms Logran’s husband, a non-Democrat voter, said he shared his wife’s disappointment with the party’s response to Covid. But he weighed the issue differently in his calculations to support Governor Murphy for a second term. “I believed that anyone who was going to take office would reject the mask orders in any way,” he said. “Some of these things were going to take care of themselves.” Interviews with New Jersey voters revealed that some of the Democrats’ breaks from their party last fall were neither fleeting nor fleeting. Many described personal struggles to emphasize what they saw as the needs of their family or community above the party character. For some, orders for vaccines and masks violated personal beliefs about their health choices that sparked fears of other possible privacy breaches. Others expressed a new nuance in their political approach, driven by loyalty to the party that has been shaken but has not yet been abandoned. Democratic voters who have left their party because of Covid often describe decisions they made only after fighting issues such as their support for abortion rights and opposition to gun control – political positions that have been at the heart of the party since years. Among them is Gina Genovese, a longtime Democrat until November, when she voted for Mr. Chiatarelli. She ran for governor of New Jersey as an independent in 2017 and was the state’s first openly gay mayor in 2006, when she presided over New Jersey’s Long Hill as a Democrat. She said she was excluded from her party’s support for the mask and vaccine orders, which she saw as violations of her personal freedom. Last year, he helped fund a lawsuit that unsuccessfully sought to meet Governor Murphy’s mask demand in schools. This year, he has repeatedly rejected fundraising requests from the Democratic Party. “The Democrats have left me so frustrated,” he said. Ms Genovese described herself as “extreme left” on global warming and gay rights, and said it was a tough decision to support Republicans during the pandemic. He said he would probably support Republican Thomas H. Kean Jr. for Congress this fall. “Everything is a balance,” he said. “I’m in favor of choice – my body, my choice,” he said, applying a common phrase from the abortion debate to the issue of mask and vaccine orders. Bridgewater, an upper-middle-class suburb of northern New Jersey, backed GOP leader Ciattarelli by 5 percentage points against Mr Murphy last fall, just one year after giving Joe Biden’s campaign a 12-point victory. Nationwide, Mr. Murphy won by 3 percentage points. Mr Biden won by 16 points. Bridgewater is in the Seventh District of New Jersey, represented by Democrat Tom Malinowski, whose possible challenger is Mr. Kean, a former state lawmaker and son of a former New Jersey governor. Democrats in the state legislature have revised the constituency this year, making several other constituencies safer for Democrats while jeopardizing Malinowski’s re-election. The district remains a Democratic majority, but with a difference of 3.7 points instead of 9.9 points. Personal learning advocate Bethany Mandel believes that the COVID pandemic and the closure of schools that coincide with it have “completely destroyed the idea of meritocracy in America” because children do not all have the same opportunities. (iStock) Mr Malinowski pushed for schools to reopen in early 2021, calling on the Biden government to ensure that teachers were among the first to be vaccinated and urging government officials to …
