Get ready for the return of Covid if Republicans win

If all indications are correct, Election Day will see a massive red wave, sweeping Republicans into power in the House, Senate, governorships, and statehouses across the country. The mood will be grim for Democrats — the night is dark and the knives are long — but there is hope right around the corner in the form of a tool they have long had at the ready: the return of Covid.

Understand, there will be no actual return of Covid in anything resembling its initial offering. It is unlikely to kill more people than it has in recent months. But what will change is Democratic acceptance of the idea that Covid is over, or that it can no longer be used as justification for emergency steps and massive spending packages.

Joe Biden announced earlier this year that he considered the pandemic over, creating a potentially disastrous problem for Democrats. But this is easily dismissed. There is still a daily death toll, and CNN could begin tracking it again any minute now. The stakes remain high. Teachers must be protected. Distancing must be the norm. Biden’s own CDC director has gotten Covid approximately 400 times. And who’s to say there won’t be some new variant or mutation to highlight that ensures Anthony Fauci and his replacement a perpetual spot in the media cycle?

You may dismiss this as hyperbole. But absent the ability to direct policy, Democrats are likely to turn to the few areas where they can exercise real control over your lives. That could mean masks go back to being mandatory in major cities, the airlines and transit systems must once again be brought to heel, and Gretchen Whitmer may ban your access to seeds just to prove that she can.

The point is not to actually save anyone, of course. It’s to keep Americans on a paranoid defensive emergency posture, where the elite powers that be know best. The voters are about to reject that very idea — it turns out they care more about the price of gas, milk, and turkeys than the umpteenth January 6 hearing — so they must be reminded of their place.

Perhaps this theory is wrong and Democrats will take the right lessons from their surviving candidates who adopted more moderate stances than Randi Weingarten and the Chicago teachers’ union. But the lure of using Covid to get things done for noble purposes and with right on their side? That seems absolutely up Joe Biden’s alley. He may claim the pandemic is over, but he’s still wearing a mask while he walks across the grass to a helicopter.