Michael Betrus writing at The Brownstone Institue, has a piece titled, “Grading the Governors: Who Locked Down and Who Opened.”
Some of the results won’t surprise, like DeSantis and Noem getting an ‘A’ or that the complete fails were all Dems. But were there surprises?
That’s probably not the best metric, surprises. It’s very subjective. There are plenty of “people” who think Noem and DeSantis [Pete Ricketts (NE), and Mark Gordon (WY), also received As] were terrible. But the facts paint them in a rosy picture if the goal was fewer hospitalizations and deaths measured against tyranny, though you could argue that fewer deaths were not a goal in many states.
Thos A Governors refusal to sacrifice individual rights, for the most part, produced average to better than average outcomes, especially compared to the complete failures like “Andrew Cuomo (NY), Phil Murphy (NJ), Gavin Newsom (CA), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), J.B. Pritzker (IL), and Tom Wolf (PA).”
My governor, Chris Sununu, got an ‘F’ partly because of the duration of school lockouts and his inaction at taking steps to end local policies statewide that failed to provide any benefit with significant downsides to kids and parents. Other F governors include,
John Carney (DE), David Ige (HI), Janet Mills (ME), Tim Waltz (MN), Steve Sisolak (NV), Michelle Lujan (NM), Roy Cooper (NC), Kate Brown (OR), Ralph Northam (VA), Jay Inslee (WA), Tony Evers (WI), Larry Hogan (MD), Charlie Baker (MA), Chris Sununu (NH) and Phil Scott (VT).
Millions of their students were locked out of schools for over a year, thousands of businesses closed and they were defiant in opening up when it was clear where the science stood. The only salvage for Ige, Mills, Brown, Scott, Sununu and Inslee is that while they kept kids out of class and closed thousands of businesses, they did achieve low relative COVID-19 deaths and all-cause excess deaths. They likely would have anyway had they let kids get educated and let businesses function.
And I agree. Sununu’s hands-on lockdown antics and scores of emergency orders in the name of public health contradict his hands-off approach to things like school and mask mandates or vaccine mandates in the private sector later along. As we’ve noted numerous times, Governments exist (among men) to protect rights, not to play both sides for your political benefit.
But Sununu’s F did surprise me. I thought D-, and maybe that’s generous, but I didn’t crunch the numbers to compare the data or measure other factors like this.
Comparing one state to another, cherry-picking low-impacted Vermont to high-impacted Mississippi is dumb; they are unlike one another in geography and demographics, and importantly, obesity. Those two states are as far apart in COVID-19 death ranking as they are in obesity ranking. Mississippi is first right now in COVID-19 deaths per capita and has the highest obesity in the country. Vermont is ranked 50th in COVID-19 deaths per capita and 46th in obesity. Correlated?
Yes, they are.
New Hampshire has ranked well in overall health for years, but that didn’t play into policy decisions, and it still doesn’t. Until the so-called cure, kids under 20 were not a vector, and none had died. The vaccine killed at least two kids before even a single kid was even reported as a covid death (and those facts remain unclear).
Despite this, thousands of kids are still being punished with poor education choices (remote or distance learning) and poor public health policy (masks and quarantines for asymptomatic kids).
Did you know that brothers and sisters of asymptomatic siblings who tested positive (whatever that means) had to stay home, sometimes for weeks.
They probably don’t mind, but they end up behind for no public good. That’s still happening in the Granite State.
Maybe that F Sununu got is deserved for his ongoing inaction along with the dozens of other points we’ve made in the past two years.
Arguing that a Democrat governor would have been worse (they would) is not an acceptable defense.
If you’d like to know did your governor did and what else was involved in the ranking, look here.
