Was It COVID-19? Pandemic Considerations and 2020 Presidential Candidate Support

• In Event: COVID-19 and Voting Behavior

Abstract

Since Donald Trump’s approval rating has rapidly decreased after February 2020, a recurring mantra in US political commentaries has been that the COVID-19 crisis has played a crucial role in his electoral defeat at the last Presidential Elections. Yet, many other factors might have contributed to that result as well. In this article we address this issue 'counterfactually,' i.e. by investigating how aggregate support for Trump and Biden would have looked like if the coronavirus pandemic had a lower or no influence in citizens’ electoral decision-making compared to real world conditions. To do this, we rely on data from the ANES 2020 Exploratory Testing Survey. For the analysis, we manipulate the effect size of pandemic-related considerations in US citizens’ electoral calculus, so as to observe the consequent changes in aggregate support for the two 2020 Presidential candidates by means of a simulation strategy requiring the use of multiple regressions.

Authors

• Lewis Alexander Luartz, University of California, Riverside

• Stefano Camatarri, Université catholique de Louvain

• Marta Gallina