Objective Facts and Elite Cues: Partisan Responses to COVID-19

American politics scholars disagree on the extent to which voters use policy information to evaluate politicians versus relying on partisan cues to evaluate policies. We demonstrate the coexistence of both of these perspectives, by studying the degree to which objective facts (measured with local COVID-19 cases) and partisan cues (measured with President Trump’s tweets about the virus) influence differences in the social distancing behaviors in Democrat and Republican counties in 2020. We find that both factors play an important role in social distancing but that the relative importance between cues and facts favors the latter. Furthermore, the importance of these signals declines over time, suggesting a crucial but underappreciated dynamic of how partisan positions evolve in a Bayesian framework.