Since 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has quietly shaped American politics.

At first, the backlash was loud and obvious. Anger about school closures and frustration with masking helped groups such as Moms for Liberty take over school boards, while pandemic-era inflation became an overriding concern in back-to-back presidential elections.

But while Covid faded as an explicit issue, its effects lingered. Donald Trump won a second term in part due to a combination of continuing frustration over inflation and nostalgia for life before the pandemic.

It even bled into policy. Trump put vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, cut thousands of health agency jobs, proposed funding cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, canceled or paused research grants, tried to claw back pandemic-era funding for state and local health departments and withdrew from the World Health Organization.

That’s a big part of what makes Tuesday’s results so notable. In Ohio, Amy Acton, who led the state’s pandemic response as its health director, won the governor’s race. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, won a Senate seat. Pediatrician Annie Andrews in South Carolina’s Senate race and numerous House candidates with medical or scientific backgrounds also won.

The candidates weren’t explicitly running on their pandemic records, but those records didn’t appear to be liabilities either. The results suggest that direct attacks over the Covid-19 response have lost much of their electoral power. The era of pandemic politics may finally be over.

Traumatic events can reshape politics for years to come. The Great Depression fueled public support for a more active federal role in the economy and a stronger safety net. The Sept. 11 attacks ushered in a more aggressive foreign policy and broader acceptance of domestic surveillance.

While the initial fights over the pandemic centered on masking, vaccine mandates and school closures, the backlash soon widened into a broader mistrust of public health institutions and government authority.

You can draw a line from angry parents protesting at their local school board over remote learning in 2021 to today’s fights over whether parents can opt their children out of certain lessons, which books can go on school library shelves and whether transgender students can play sports.

Similarly, conspiracy theories about mRNA vaccines have metastasized into an amorphous “Make America Healthy Again” movement with thoughts on pediatric vaccine schedules, among other things. Your neighbor who took ivermectin during the pandemic may now be turning to vitamin A and cod liver oil to treat measles.

The effects aren’t limited to public health. The short-term success of the emergency business loans and individual stimulus checks at staving off an even worse economic crisis during the pandemic seems to have opened up the debate over direct cash payments — once considered politically unthinkable. “Stimmies” may have paved the way for Trump Accounts, guaranteed-income pilots programs and the president’s near-constant promises of DOGE dividends, tariff refunds and gas rebates.

But while those broader effects are likely to remain with us for a while, the more direct era of pandemic politics appears to be over.

Ohio offered the clearest test this election cycle of whether those old fights still work at the ballot box. Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy tried to make Acton’s pandemic record a liability, reviving battles over school closures and public health restrictions and accusing her of promoting a “Covid ideology.” Ohioans elected her anyway.

The mistrust and grievances unleashed by the pandemic are still shaping American politics. But Tuesday’s results suggest that attacks on pandemic-era restrictions and public health officials are no longer reliable vote-getters.

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