Opinion / Sasha Issenberg
Silent treatment
It was a Californian, Richard Nixon, who first coined the term “silent majority” when describing a faction of largely white, conservative voters who were quietly angry with liberalism’s excesses. It was this same bloc that California right-wing activists expected to rouse last summer, when they initiated a process to remove the state’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom (pictured) at the height of the pandemic’s first wave. A coalition of small-business owners, parents of school-aged children and those simply angry at elite hypocrisy (Newsom famously was caught dining maskless with a lobbyist at an opulent Napa County restaurant in defiance of his own public guidance) would rise up at the chance to replace the state’s governor. Or so the organisers of the recall hoped.
After Tuesday’s vote kept Newsom in office by a comfortable margin, it’s clear that those forces don’t amount to much beyond a loud opposition. Though postal ballots are still being counted, as it stands barely more than a third of Californians chose to recall Newsom midway through his four-year term. In a campaign waged largely over how he handled the pandemic, voters took his side. A CNN exit poll found that 65 per cent of voters said that coronavirus was a “public health responsibility” rather than a “personal choice” and 70 per cent supported a mask requirement in schools.
It turns out that those who wanted to impose aggressive public-health measures to confront the virus – but have been conditioned through media coverage to fear backlash from anti-maskers and vaccine sceptics – had little to worry about. And the message seems to be spreading beyond the country’s most populous state. Last week, Joe Biden mandated that the federal workforce be vaccinated and required all private employers with more than 100 workers to follow a jab-or-test regime. Democrats running for governor of Virginia and New Jersey this autumn are taking a similar line. The true pandemic-era silent majority seems to be those who want sensible precautions to fight disease.
Sasha Issenberg is a Monocle correspondent currently based in Los Angeles.