What I got wrong about vaccine mandates
When we started working on mandates I carried an assumption I had not examined. I pictured a single axis, enthusiastic supporters at one end, hardened refusers at the other, most people somewhere in the middle, and policy as the job of finding the point on that line where you lose fewest people.
That picture is wrong in a way that matters.
When you break a mandate into its parts, who it covers, what the exemptions look like, what happens if you decline, how long it runs, people do not sort onto a line. They sort into groups that care about different parts. One group will accept almost any coverage rule but reacts badly to punitive consequences. Another has no problem with consequences but wants medical exemptions handled by a doctor rather than a form. A third mostly wants to know when it ends.
That has a practical consequence I did not anticipate. Two mandates with the same overall support can be supported by completely different people. Soften the penalty and you gain one group while losing another, and the headline number barely moves. If you are only watching the headline number, you conclude the change did not matter. It mattered enormously to who was in the room.
It also explains something that puzzled me early on. Public opposition to mandates often spiked over details that looked administratively trivial to the people designing them. The exemption paperwork. The review date. Those were not trivial to the groups they landed on.
I now think the useful question is rarely “will the public accept a mandate”. It is “which mandate, and who does each version lose”. The first question has a number for an answer. The second has a design.