Following the 2020 presidential race, many pundits and academics were quick to claim that the pandemic might have altered the outcome of the election; these authors disagree

Did exposure to COVID-19 affect vote choice in the 2020 presidential election? Marco Mendoza Aviña, Semra Sevi. Research & Politics, August 18, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/20531680211041505

Abstract: An important body of literature shows that citizens evaluate elected officials based on their past performance. In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the conventional wisdom in both media and academic discourse was that Donald Trump would have been a two-term president absent an unprecedented, global force majeure. In this research note, we address a simple question: did exposure to COVID-19 impact vote choice in the 2020 presidential election? Using data from the Cooperative Election Study, we find that Trump’s vote share decreased because of COVID-19. However, there is no evidence suggesting that Joe Biden loses the election when no voter reports exposure to coronavirus cases and deaths. These negligible effects are found at both the national and state levels, and are robust to an exhaustive set of confounders across model specifications.

Keywords: 2020 US presidential election, COVID-19, Biden, Trump, vote choice

Conclusion

Following the 2020 presidential race, many pundits and academics were quick to claim that the pandemic might have altered the outcome of the election. While limited to a single instance of COVID-19’s electoral impact (i.e. self-reported exposure to the virus), our findings do not support the claim that the pandemic cost Trump his re-election. There is no doubt that COVID-19 negatively affected Trump’s electoral performance; yet our counterfactual analysis shows that the presidential two-party vote is virtually unchanged when no voter contracts the disease.⁸ The null finding for those who were personally diagnosed is consistent with previous analyses having found that support for Trump increased in some of the areas that were hardest hit by COVID-19 (McMinn and Stein, 2020). Our results are also consistent with the fact that Trump’s approval ratings were remarkably stable throughout his presidency (FiveThirtyEight, 2021). In early 2020, fewer than 45% of American adults approved of Trump’s job as president. This percentage fluctuated somewhat over the year but remained in the mid-forties until January 2021. This suggests, as our results do, that the extraordinary circumstances that arose during that election year did little to change the electorate’s crystalized – and overall unfavorable – views of the 45th president.