In a big Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 51 percent of Democrats described the pandemic as the biggest problem facing the country, whereas only 28 percent of independents and 19 percent of Republicans did.

This suggests that the response to Covid is beginning to become a wedge issue — Democrats can play to their base, which is most invested in maintaining restrictions, only at the risk of alienating the broader electorate.

Biden, whose handling of Covid is less and less popular, shows signs of being conflicted. The White House counseled against panic at the outset of the Omicron surge and even talked of a declaration of independence from the virus last summer. But the president hasn’t been able to make it unmistakable that he thinks we’ve entered a new phase in the pandemic. As the heterodox center-left writer Matthew Yglesias points out, the Biden administration may believe that it has embraced normality, but what it has really done is only make “the most extreme public-health people mad at them.”

If the administration wants to make a statement, it could decisively turn against the teachers’ unions on the issue of keeping schools open, siding with parents and kids over a Democratic interest group. It could relax its indefensibly sweeping guidance on school masking and instantly pave the way for local school districts to lift their mandates. It could end the federal mask mandates on travel.