Anthony Fauci recently testified before the Senate about the COVID-19 crisis. If you were watching (I was not), you probably noticed that only some of those Senators present were wearing face masks.
Twitter noticed:
Dr. Anthony Fauci is about to testify before the Senate. Everyone in this camera shot is wearing a mask, except for Susan Collins.
Because wearing a mask to protect yourself and others from a deadly virus is now deemed partisan and anti-Trump. pic.twitter.com/t4K7cMl4YC
— Charlotte Clymer 🏳️🌈 (@cmclymer) May 12, 2020
… as did the New York Times. Many have also remarked on President Trump’s refusal to wear masks, even when looking at masks in a place that makes masks. The message seems to be clear: wearing a mask is a partisan decision, even as a bare majority of Republicans report that they wish that Trump would wear a mask when he travels.
Is that true outside of the Senate—do Americans’ decisions to wear masks depend on their partisan identity? As a continuing part my collaborative work on the politics of COVID-19 in the United States with Shana Gadarian and Sara Goodman, we recently asked a random, representative sample of 2400 Americans if they are wearing masks in public. Here is what we found from logistic regressions that adjust for a full set of dummies for age, race, gender, marital status, income, education, urban-rural, and state fixed effects.
Adjusting for those differences, Democrats are more than 20 percentage points more likely than Republicans to (75% versus 53%) to report wearing masks in public.
We can look to explain what’s driving this result by allowing the estimate of partisanship to differ by respondent characteristics: level of education, family income, urban or rural,* or state-level results from the 2016 presidential election.**
These results tell us a couple of things.
- Partisan differences between Democrats and Republicans are largest among the middle range of incomes. They are smaller and usually statistically insignificant at the highest and lowest income levels.
- Partisan differences between Democrats and Republicans are largest in urban areas. They are small and statistically insignificant in rural areas.
- Partisan differences between Democrats and Republicans can be found across education levels, except for among those respondents who have not completed a high school degree.
- Partisan differences can be found in Trump-supporting states as well as those who voted strongly for Clinton. However, mask-wearing levels are consistently lower across the board in states that voted strongly for Trump. (The five points plotted are the 10th, 25h, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile of Trump’s 2-party vote share by state.)
Whatever drives these differences, wearing a mask is partisan now.
NOTES
* For education, income, and urban/rural, we allow for nonlinear relationships between each level of each variable and partisanship.
** Here, we model state-level Trump vote share as a continuous variable, and estimate state-level random effects.
Tom Pepinsky 
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42 responses to “Yes, Wearing a Mask is Partisan Now”
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