In the long aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, a soft social consensus has emerged that Democrats have been consistently punished for unpopular positions that their organized "Group" constituencies forced them to take. I think that this argument overlooks (a) how uneven that track record of punishment has been--see, for example, the 2022 midterms, but also (b) how popular those policies were at the time.
To that end, I created some quick analyses of survey results illustrating the opinion dynamics in 2020. I checked far more stuff than this, but this will be enough for you to get the idea of the work I've been doing.
I use data from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Survey, a poll conducted by a crack team of political scientists that was in the field during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can download and explore the data from the link above--examining the data data in R could be slow for you depending on your computational resources.
I look at two questions--the first capturing respondents' perceptions of whether the country was on the "right track" or the "wrong track." My specific measure is the "Right Track" - "Wrong Track" margin. That question demonstrates that respondents' perceptions of the country's "track" were actually imporving almost linearly until the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic--at which point they fell by about 15 points. This underscores something I think has been lost in the recriminations over the long tail of the pandemic: the modal survey respondent felt that our collective response to the pandemic was underwhelming and principly blamed Trump. Moreover, there were declines in the right/wrong margins in late May early June that were as large as those at the height of the early pandemic, maybe larger. Americans' concern for racial equality grew--mobilized by protests--and it caused them to become more critical of incumbent politicians (above all Trump) during this time period.
A second analysis is much simpler, and looks at supports for continued mask mandates from the late Fall of 2020 until the early Spring of 2021. Throughout the entire time series, almost exactly 80% of respondents expressed "strong" or "somewhat" support for continued mask madates. I argue that this cuts against an account of Americans growing tired of COVID mitigation by Summer 2020.
This analysis examined just a few survey questions in a long-running public opinion series examining Americans' political attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic. We can see why some (but by no means all!) politicians took more liberal positions on racial justice and COVID-19 in 2020--those issues dominated Americans' perceptions of politics during this time period, and respondents were, at least in this moment, espousing relatively liberal positions on these issues.