“If they opened up the schools in the fall of 2020, Terry McAuliffe wins,” said Rory Cooper, a Republican strategist who lives in Northern Virginia and has been a persistent public voice on these issues.

“Democrats always have underestimated how many Democrats were mad at the school closures. In my very blue neighborhood, there were first-time Republican voters this cycle, which you would normally think is nuts a year out of Trump. But they were voting in their self-interest, which is what voters typically do, and their self-interest includes their kids,” Cooper added.

“I think that you could sum up the entire election with: The schools aren’t working.”…

In my own neighborhood, the rough North Carolina equivalent of Rory Cooper’s in Virginia, this fall I, too, started to feel people at polar ends of the political spectrum inching closer and closer together on specific, schools-centric issues like masks. Their shared thoughts distilled: When can our kids take them off, especially as more and more of them get vaccinated? Because what they’re giving up is not now, and arguably never has been, commensurate with the risk they’re taking on. People who don’t talk politics, or who recently haven’t talked much at all, period, because of political disagreements only exacerbated by the pandemic, are adjusting to the reality of unexpected like-mindedness.