Emerging health crises, by their nature, challenge and overwhelm federal political systems. Within the context of the COVID-19, states and governors were called on take charge in the absence of coordinated federal response (Bowman & McKenzie, 2020; Weissert, Uttermark, Mackie, & Artiles, 2021). The result was uneven policy responses both in terms of efforts to control the spread of the virus (economic lockdowns, masks mandates, and social distances) and the health-related and economic consequences of the pandemic (Warner & Zhang, 2021; Zhang & Warner, 2020). Birkland et. al. (2021) refer to this patchwork of fragmented policy responses as “variable-speed, go-it-alone” kaleidoscope federalism. While existing work has explored public evaluations of state government policies aimed at minimizing the public health and economic consequences of the pandemic, we explore how primary care physicians evaluated state responsibility for the pandemic and the efficacy of state government policies. Using an original survey of 625 primary care physicians, we find that, like the general public, physician attributions of responsibility and evaluations of state government response were driven more by partisan affiliation and ideology than by the effectiveness of state policies.