Evidence from spring–early summer 2020 shows that the central COVID-related political fight in the U.S. did indeed shift to how and when to exit lockdowns, matching Sacks’s prediction.

Key points:

• By early April 2020, roughly 42 U.S. states already had some form of stay‑at‑home or lockdown order, so the main policy question was no longer whether to impose them but what to do next. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Beginning in mid‑April 2020, coordinated “reopen” protests spread across numerous states. These protests explicitly demanded that states be “re-opened” and focused on the economic and social costs of ongoing restrictions, not on debating initial imposition. (en.wikipedia.org)
• On April 16, 2020, the White House released the “Opening Up America Again” guidelines, a three‑phase plan for rolling back restrictions; this triggered a high‑profile political dispute over how quickly to reopen and who had authority—Trump or the governors—again centering the debate on exit strategy and timing. (de.wikipedia.org)
• Multiple interstate compacts (e.g., the Western States Pact and similar northeastern/midwestern agreements) were formed specifically to coordinate the rollback of economic restrictions, reinforcing that many governors framed the main policy challenge as managing reopening. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Retrospectives on 2020 U.S. politics note that pandemic response became a major election issue, with Democrats generally favoring cautious reopening and Republicans pushing a faster return to a fully open economy—again, a dispute over how and when to exit restrictions. (en.wikipedia.org)

It is true that by late May and through summer 2020, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests became a dominant national political issue. (en.wikipedia.org) However, within the domain Sacks was clearly talking about—COVID policy—the near‑term “next big political debate” in spring–early summer 2020 was indeed about strategies and timing for getting out of quarantines and lockdowns, not about whether to impose them. Therefore the prediction is best judged as right.