AUSTIN, Texas — It’s been two and a half years since the start of the pandemic. And even though Texans are still testing positive for COVID-19, polling shows the virus isn’t a top issue for voters. That’s why candidates are steering clear of the topic on the campaign trail.

“If candidates don’t feel the issue is going to help them win over voters or mobilize their base, they aren’t going to discuss it,” said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University. “Their goal is to win an election, not engage in a public education campaign.” 

Gov. Greg Abbott is betting big on the border and economy. His Democratic challenger, Beto O’Rourke, is more focused on abortion and guns. Neither candidate has made the pandemic a focal point of their campaign. 

O’Rourke didn’t even mention the virus when he announced his run for governor last year. He focused on the electric grid instead.

“Democrats and Republicans alike want to get back to essentially their lives pre-COVID. And so raising the issue of the specter of COVID and focusing on the negative is only going to cause you problems. It’s not going to win you many votes,” Jones said. “For people who are stressed and very concerned about COVID-19 and its threat to the health of the public, they’re already voting Democratic. So the Democrats don’t need to do much to mobilize them. But if they focus too much on COVID, they’re going to be seen as focusing on issues that aren’t a priority for a large proportion of voters... focusing on an issue that’s more of a negative than a positive.”

Only 1% of Texans see COVID as the most important problem facing the state, according to a University of Texas and Texas Politics Project Poll from August. In October, the same group released a new dataset that shows only 21% of Texans see COVID as “a significant crisis.”

But COVID has killed nearly 90,000 Texans since 2020, according to state data, 40,000 of those people died after the vaccine was readily available. 

“This is the single largest tragedy that has affected the state of Texas. The next closest thing are the 20,000-plus Texans who sacrificed their lives for World War II,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, the co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital. He’s also the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. 

“We’re talking about something of extraordinary magnitude,” Dr. Hotez continued. “It’s profoundly sad and heartbreaking, particularly for those who lost loved ones needlessly because their lives could have been saved had they agreed to get vaccinated.” 

Dr. Hotez blames anti-vaccine activism, which he calls “anti-science aggression.”

“This represents this new political allegiance and affiliation to the anti-vaccine movement,” Dr. Hotez said. “Over the last seven, eight years, the anti-vaccine movement changed from going up against Clinton–making false claims about autism–to becoming more of a political movement, into this banner of health freedom, medical freedom. That’s what really jacked up during the pandemic. And so it became fully ensconced in far-right politics in America.”

Dr. Hotez said COVID might be worth talking about on the campaign trail, especially to promote booster shots.

“If we’re desperate for Americans to get their booster… you have to talk about COVID,” Dr. Hotez said. “You have to remind people that it’s still with us, and there may be troubled waters ahead with this new variant. So there’s still a lot to talk about. Even though politically, it may not make sense to do that, if you’re really committed to saving lives, it’s important.”

The governor recently renewed the COVID disaster proclamation in Texas, even as he downplays the severity of the pandemic. Jones said the governor could be doing that to prepare resources for another outbreak. But more realistically, Jones said he’s using it to gain power over agencies and budgets that he normally wouldn’t have access to.

Even though both candidates for governor have tested positive for the coronavirus over the past year, COVID is an issue they are not going to bring up this close to Election Day, which is Nov. 8. Texans can vote early until Nov. 4.

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