Elites seem divided on reopening the country. The mass public? Not so much.

Polls tells us that most Americans prioritize combatting the disease

It is tricky to talk about the trade-offs between keeping the country locked-down and letting it open up. On one side, there is an assumption of some degree of moral deficiency that comes when one argues that business closures are causing more harm than good—that an economic crisis might cause more damage than the lives lost from a pandemic. On the other, we must admit that staying holed up in our homes indefinitely is not a long-term policy solution, even if it will save the most lives.

But debates such as these are only really happening inside the beltway. Out there, in both the built-up cities and sparse rural towns of “real” America, the people are mostly unified in their verdict: staying home is the right thing to do.

Such is the finding in a new poll from the Pew Research Center, out on Thursday. Their survey shows that a large majority (68%) of the public worries that states may lift their COVID-19 restrictions too quickly, while under a third (31%) think that restrictions won’t be lifted soon enough. There is a rather obvious partisan divide on the question, with Democrats favoring restrictions staying in place and a slight majority of Republicans think they should go:

Honestly, none of this is all that surprising to me. Because Donald Trump has cheered on Americans protesting stay-at-home orders, it would be weird if we didn’t see some degree of a partisan divide on the pandemic. And that elites seem more ideologically divided over the government response to the pandemic than the mass public is also consistent with the social science evidence showing that highly-educated, politically-engaged voters tend to have much harder-held and ideologically consistent beliefs than everyday people.

I guess I had hoped that the political psychology of pandemics would be different than the political psychology of most other issues in American politics. That we would see people unite in defense of science and the CDC and resist the typical political and ideological siloing that polarize opinion and create gridlock. That we’re seeing both partisan and (suspected, technically) elite-masses divides over how the government ought to handle covid-19 is a sobering reminder that we’re partisans at heart. But the relatively high levels of support for the lockdown across parties might prompt hope that we haven’t lost all rationality… yet.