Yes, Elections Have Consequences
Americans reputedly have short attention spans. But their decisions have long fuses. People vote for reasons that may be quite contingent, even temporary or incidental, but that seem compelling in the moment—with effects that detonate long afterward.
Republicans won a remarkable nine seats in the U.S. Senate in the elections of 2014. That sweep empowered Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to block President Barack Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court. McConnell held the seat open until a Republican president could fill it—setting us on the path to a conservative supermajority on the Court that this year reached a 6–3 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
What enabled the Republicans’ extraordinary showing in those midterms? Good evidence suggests that the GOP owed its sweep to an event almost forgotten in this decade that is now so defined by the COVID-19 pandemic: the panic in the fall of 2014 over the Ebola virus.
The first on September 30: A Liberian man sick with the disease had flown into the U.S. seeking care. Though uninsured, he treatment at a Dallas hospital but died a week later—having infected two of his American nurses. (They recovered.) It was exactly the kind of story, freighted with fear and resentment, to supercharge Republican voters.
