Benchmarks or Bull?: How Voters Evaluate the Severity of COVID-19.

• In Event: Political Opinion During a Pandemic

Abstract

The novel coronavirus, and the Trump Administration's handling of it, dominated the 2020 presidential campaign. A key metric in evaluating America's response to the pandemic is per capita death rate relative to other comparable nations. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump consistently asserted that the death rate in the United States compared favorably to those of other countries. To evaluate voter perceptions regarding America's relative standing, and assess the correlates of those perceptions, we present analyses of novel representative national survey data from the UMass Poll (N=1500), conducted online by YouGov shortly before Election Day. We asked respondents to assess the severity of the pandemic in the US vis-a-vis death rates in other advanced, wealthy countries. This is of interest since some studies of American and comparative literatures show that retrospective voting is affected by benchmarking in which voters evaluate incumbents not only on local economic conditions, but take some account of relative performance vis-a-vis other states and countries (Kayser and Peress APSR 2012, BJPS 2019). Trump voters were notably more likely to believe the United States death rate lower than peer nations, though many responded that our rates were "about average." We examine the extent to which these responses are informed by local conditions in respondents' communities (measured at the state, county and media market levels) and by respondent's patterns of media consumption.

Authors

• David Karol, University of Maryland

• Alexander George Theodoridis, University of Massachusetts Amherst