Things Are Not Getting Better for Susan Collins

3. North Carolina

Let’s consider “vaccine politics,” a not-at-all frightening term.

Jaime Harrison is allowed to blow it, if he must. It’s South Carolina! But Cal Cunningham, the North Carolina Democratic challenger to Sen. Thom Tillis, is not allowed. Cunningham’s contest stands a good chance of being the tipping-point race that decides control of the Senate. If he blows it, well, he’s officially exiled to Maine for a life sentence of bathing Susan Collins’ lobsters. So our blowing-it-o-meters were set off this week when Cunningham said in a debate he would be “hesitant” to take a COVID-19 vaccine, adding that he would have a lot of “questions” because of “the way we’ve seen politics intervening in Washington.” Both Tillis and national Republicans slammed Cunningham immediately after the debate for his “anti-vaxxer” conspiracy theory. The question, however, was whether he would feel safe taking a vaccine if it was available by Election Day. On Nov. 3. Forty-six days from now. Polling shows that majorities of the country share Cunningham’s hesitancy and fear that political pressure is causing the Food and Drug Administration to “rush” the vaccine. The Surge doesn’t share this hesitancy: If the odds of a mystery injection today are 20 percent “effective COVID inoculation” and 80 percent “Raiders of the Lost Ark face melt,” we’ll roll the dice. But fears are understandable when, say, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director testifies under oath that vaccines won’t be widely available until mid-2021 and immediately gets chewed out by the corrupt president who’s nearing his reelection. If Tillis and company want to get the most meat out of their “anti-vaxxer” attacks, they should urge the president to stop converting more Americans to vaccine skepticism by being the way that he is. But anyway, the race is tight.

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