Partisanship, Health Behavior, and Policy Attitudes in the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Individual choices made during the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic shape the course of the virus’s spread and the risks facing human populations. Yet the response to COVID-19 in the United States has been deeply political, and elite messaging from the administration of President Donald J. Trump may have produced a differential mass public health response among his supporters. To estimate the extent of these differences, we conducted an original survey of 3,000 American citizens between March 20-23 to collect data on health behavior, attitudes, and opinions about how to respond to the crisis. Measuring partisanship as party affiliation, intended 2020 Presidential vote, and self-placed ideological positioning, we find that political differences are the single most consistent factor that differentiates’ Americans health behaviors and policy preferences. These results suggest that in the United States, public health messaging must deliberately transcend political cleavages in order to produce widely shared pro-social healthbehavior.