As of February 17, 2022, only a few remaining states still have mask mandates in any form. The Omicron variant is waning, the public is exhausted, and state governments were anxious to return to some semblance of normal post-pandemic life.

But a month prior, on January 12, 2022, in the depths of the Omicron variant, 11 US states plus the District of Columbia had some kind of statewide mask mandate in response to COVID-19. Most of these were statewide mandates that required masks for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, and a few were partial mandates that required mask-wearing for the unvaccinated or varied based on the level of transmission. 

Perhaps predictably, the mandates were all in states that were run by Democrats. Every single state with a mandate had not just a Democratic governor, but a Democratic trifecta – that is, Democrats control the governor’s office and both chambers of the state legislature.

This makes sense on the surface. Democrats are generally more in favor of more expansive and stringent public health measures, and 80% of Democrats say COVID-19 is a major threat to the health of the population compared to only 38% of Republicans. 79% of Democrats rate public health officials favorably compared to only 37% of Republicans, and 85% believe restrictions to slow the spread of the virus have been worth the cost. Is it really shocking that dark blue states like California, Hawaii, and New York had a statewide mask mandate but Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina don’t? 

But if we instead focus on the exceptions to this pattern during Omicron, the story is much more interesting. Three states with a Democratic trifecta did not have mask mandates in the midst of the Omicron variant: Colorado, Maine, and New Jersey. Each went for Biden over Trump in the last election by a margin of 9% or more. Compare these three to a comparable state like New Mexico, which has a statewide mandate but went for Biden by 10% over Trump. Then compare them to Nevada, which has a mandate set at the state level based on risk in each county (which has effectively become a mask mandate in the state’s population centers, on order from the state level), which went for Biden by less than 3% over Trump in 2020 and whose governor is at a much more serious risk of losing his job than any other state with a mask mandate. Why did Nevada and New Mexico, mild-to-moderate blue states, continue on this path while their contemporaries in Colorado, Maine, and New Jersey do not?

Health Outcomes

Let’s start with the health outcomes among these five states compared to the national environment, as it’s important to understand if there is a serious difference on the ground in the public health considerations for each state.

State	All Time Cases/100K	All Time Deaths/100K	% Fully Vaccinated	Partisan Lean
U.S. Average	19,835	256	63%	N/A
Colorado	19,319	188	67%	D+6.4
Maine	11,967	123	77%	D+4
Nevada	18,595	280	57%	R+2.5
New Jersey	22,455	339	71%	D+12
New Mexico	19,026	293	67%	D+7

On every metric, Colorado and Maine perform better than the country overall. Over the course of the pandemic, they have outperformed the national average in cases, deaths, and vaccination rate. New Mexico is something of a middle case – it has a high number of deaths per 100,000 and only a slightly better caseload and vaccination rate. But Nevada and New Jersey have underperformed the country. Despite being above average in vaccinations, New Jersey has had more deaths per 100,000 than all but only three other states (Mississippi, Arizona, and Alabama) and its cases per 100,000 is also above the national average. Nevada’s vaccination rate lags the country, and its deaths are higher, though its caseload is slightly lower. 

This may explain why Colorado and Maine avoided reinstating any kind of mask mandate and justifies why New Mexico has opted to act like your average Democratic state, but it raises more questions about the stark policy differences between New Jersey – one of the bluest states in the country and also one that has had one of the worst fates in the pandemic – and Nevada, a purple state that remained steadfast in its mandate through the holidays. 

But it doesn’t explain why Colorado, Maine, and New Jersey have given up their mandates while states like Washington (13,741 cases per 100,000; 135 deaths per 100,000; and 69% vaccination), Oregon (12,172; 139; and 67%) or California (17,512; 197; and 67%) kept them through the holidays. Neither Colorado nor New Jersey have done better than these states in outcomes, so why the difference in policy? And why did Nevada keep its mandate when a state like New Jersey – which has inarguably fared worse from a deaths and cases perspective – did not?

Economic Realities

In Nevada’s case, there’s an economic answer. As we unpacked in a piece last month on the Republican primary in Nevada, the state has a much higher share of employees in personal care and services-related occupations such as dealers, ticket takers, theater workers, concierges, and other positions that require direct interaction with tourists from all over the world who could be unwitting spreaders of the virus themselves. The closest comparison is Hawaii, 10% of whose GDP is thanks to tourism, which is actually less than Nevada, where tourism is responsible for 16% of the state’s GDP, the highest percentage in the country. Hawaii has also maintained its mask mandate and imposed far stricter travel rules than Nevada. The nature of Nevada’s economy makes it particularly vulnerable to pandemic-related shocks, as a significant portion of it rests on entertainment, travel, and face-to-face interaction. For these reasons, Nevada received the second-worst score in terms of how it has fared against the pandemic in Politico’s analysis. Requiring the transient tourists in Las Vegas to mask up when caseloads are high seems like a no brainer, and the state’s regulatory apparatus for gaming has wielded its power to that end; enforcing the mandate within other businesses has been much more difficult.

Of course, New Jersey does have the second-highest level of gaming revenue in the country, but it’s no match to Nevada proportionally. The Garden State’s GDP is about 3.5 times the size of Nevada’s and its population is three times bigger. New Jersey has a higher percent of the population in the labor force, a much higher share of individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher, higher household income, and fewer people in poverty. New Jersey’s economy is simply less vulnerable to the pandemic even though its population has suffered more casualties from it.

Colorado falls in this boat too – it has a high-functioning workforce with a high capacity to work remotely, thanks to its large proportion of knowledge workers. But the fact of the matter is from a vaccination standpoint, New Jersey and Colorado vastly outperform Nevada – so while economic factors matter, it’s not a stretch to see why a mask mandate would remain in a Democratic-leaning state with an unusually high level of tourism and face-to-face interaction that nonetheless has a low vaccination rate. It’s simply safer to wear a mask and that showed in Nevada, where they had fewer cases compared to similarly-vaccinated states that did not implement a mask mandate during the peak of the Delta variant. But acknowledging that leads us to our last consideration – if the policy produces better outcomes, why did other states adopt it?

Political Considerations

Not all states with Democratic trifectas are created equal. The Democratic Party’s chance of losing control in California is smaller than it is in New Jersey, and smaller in New Jersey than in Colorado. New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Phil Murphy was up for reelection in 2021 and only narrowly scraped out a win in November. Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis is up for reelection this year in a more purple state than New Jersey or California. So are these governors’ hesitancy to impose a mask mandate a political consideration?

Data says yes – an increase in Biden’s vote percentage in 2020 by 1% in a given state tends to correspond with about a 2% increased probability of the state having a mask mandate in the midst of Omicron. If we consider statewide mask mandates a binary choice, giving each state a value of zero or one, we can show the most disproportionate states based on our understanding of the correlation between Biden vote share in the 2020 election. This provides a “predicted” value for each state, which we can plot against the actual results to see the most disproportionate outliers.

Nevada, a state that gave Biden just over 50% of its vote in 2020 is the most disproportionate state: its predicted value is 0.26 (closer to no mask mandate at zero, than to a mask mandate at one), but it gets a full one in reality because it does have a statewide mandate. This is a 0.74 difference, the largest overall. Slightly-less-moderate New Mexico and Oregon are in a similar situation. 

On the opposite end we have the states we’ve been discussing: Colorado and New Jersey. They are both Democratic-leaning enough that this registers in the opposite direction; they have no mask mandate but we would predict them to be much more likely to. Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maryland – which we ignored earlier because they are not technically Democratic trifectas (each has a Republican governor) – are in a similar position: so blue that it’s very strange they don’t have a mandate. If we adjust by state trifectas, giving every GOP trifecta a value of negative one, a Democratic trifecta a value of one, and split control of the state government a zero, we can flatten the model to adjust for those unusual cases of Republican governors or legislatures in otherwise blue-leaning states.

This is a much more important predictor for states having mask mandates in the middle of Omicron’s onslaught. Including both Biden vote share and state government trifectas in the model shows that a change in trifecta status is about 17 times more important than if Biden’s vote share in a state jumped by 10%. But it also brings us back to where we started: Nevada’s mandate is less unusual given its trifecta, but still unusual given its lower Biden vote percentage, while Colorado, Maine, and New Jersey – despite all having Democratic trifectas – are the most off their predicted value. In other words, they’re predicted to have statewide mask mandates! 

Though these three states did not have mandates, it’s worth noting that just because there waas no statewide mask mandate did not mean there weren’t still some mandates at the local level. In Colorado, Maine, and New Jersey, the decision was left up to cities or counties. This brings us to a somewhat cynical conclusion. Governors in these states had, more or less, kicked the can down to local officials. Meanwhile, in states like Nevada and New Mexico, though there are some economic and health-related explanations, governors led from the top.

Facing the Omicron variant, New Mexico and Nevada concluded that mask mandates are the least worst option (and, perhaps, more cynically, they do not trust counties to make the right decisions). Governor Sisolak in Nevada insisted “I’m in the middle of a surge… it’s certainly not a time that we’re going to reduce any of the protocols that we have in place” while concurrently affirming there would be no lockdowns or capacity limits. While the order in New Mexico concedes that “While vaccines are the most effective method to prevent the spread of COVID-19, masks… continue to be necessary to protect New Mexicans who are ineligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine or who choose not to receive a vaccine.”

Back in New Jersey, Governor Murphy took the opposite tact, comparing the state to New York, which issued a vaccine-or-mask mandate. “We think what we’ve got in place meets the moment, in terms of masking and what New York is doing,” Murphy said in December. Despite a few localities determining their own rules, face masks across the rest of the state remain “no longer required.” In Maine it is simply recommended to wear a mask in public places with high rates of transmission. And in Colorado Governor Polis has said he believes “the state shouldn’t tell people what to wear.” 

A patchwork of cities across all three states – from the large metropolitan areas of Denver, Portland, and Newark, to the mid-sized satellite cities of Boulder and Paterson – continued to require masks in January, at the peak of Omicron. Biden won around 80% of the vote in all of them. The same cannot be said about the states that elected their governors. Maine’s Democratic Governor Janet Mills is primed to face her unpopular predecessor in her 2022 reelection; Murphy has likely just won the last election he’ll ever run; the Colorado governor’s race is rated “Solidly Democratic.”

“We’re encouraging people to wear masks when they’re inside. That’s the rule,” said Sisolak as the state prepared to face Omicron. Nevada’s 2022 governor’s race is considered a toss-up.