One Democratic governor has been in that zone for months. Jared Polis formally declared Colorado’s emergency over all the way back in July. He allowed local jurisdictions to implement mandates as they saw fit — his hometown of Boulder, for example, still has an indoor mask requirement — but rescinded nearly all COVID-related statewide executive orders. Polis didn’t reinstate them when the Delta variant caused a surge in deaths, though he did vent about the unvaccinated to reporters: “I have no qualms if they have a death wish, but they’re clogging our hospitals.” And he kept up the vaxxed-and-done approach even as Omicron landed. “At this point, if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault,” he told an interviewer in December.

Polis’s approach appears to be working, both in terms of public health and his own political fortunes. Colorado’s COVID numbers largely look like the country’s. By early February, newly reported cases were down almost 70 percent from two weeks earlier, and hospitalization numbers were down by a quarter — both roughly matching the national averages. Since the pandemic’s start, Colorado has the tenth-lowest COVID death rate per capita in the U.S. Meanwhile, Polis appears to be on an easy path to reelection in November during what’s expected to be a terrible season for Democrats everywhere else. No big-name Republican has emerged to take him on, and the Cook Political Report rates the race as “Solid Democrat.”

Entering the third year of the virus’s spread, Polis has put forth a simple formulation. He believes that every governor will have to adapt to endemic circumstances eventually, that there’s only so much he can do for the persistently unvaxxed, and that COVID lifestyle restrictions have been costlier than other Democrats have acknowledged.