"We thought that the more worried people were about COVID, the more likely they were to be following all of the, kind of public health best practices," says Shana Gadarian, associate professor of political science. "And that's not what we found. What we found was that the biggest divider in people's behaviors was not their age, not their demographics, not their education; it was their partisanship."

Professor Grant Reeher says that Trump's exaggerations of labeling Democrats as socialists and radicals are having little impact, and that, "after four years, voters are used to the hyperbole."