Politics still in COVID’s shadow
Malaise of 2020 lingers in race
In March 2020, when Joe Biden and Donald Trump competed for the White House for the first time, American life became almost unrecognizable. A deadly virus and a public health lockdown remade daily routines with startling speed, leaving little time for the country to prepare.
Four years later, the coronavirus pandemic has largely receded from public attention and receives little discussion on the campaign trail. And yet, as the same two men run once again, COVID-19 quietly endures as a social and political force. Although diminished, the pandemic has become the background music of the presidential campaign trail, shaping how voters feel about the nation, the government, and their politics.
Public confidence in institutions — the presidency, public schools, the criminal justice system, the news media, Congress — slumped in surveys in the aftermath of the pandemic and has yet to recover. The pandemic hardened voter distrust in government, a sentiment Trump and his allies are using to their advantage. Fears of political violence, even civil war, are at record highs, and rankings of the nation’s happiness at record lows. And views of the nation’s economy and confidence in the future remain bleak, even as the country has defied expectations of a recession.
Elected officials, strategists, historians, and sociologists say the lasting effects of the pandemic are visible today in the debates over inflation, education, public health, college debt, crime, and trust in American democracy itself. The lingering trauma, they said, is contributing to a sense of national malaise that voters express in polling and focus groups — a kind of pandemic hangover that appears to be hurting Biden and helping Trump in their presidential rematch.
Biden’s administration passed a robust package of legislation and issued executive actions that helped steer the country out of the crisis, but voters give the president limited credit for his accomplishments and remain pessimistic about the economy and the nation’s direction. Trump oversaw the most acute phase of the pandemic, but he casts himself as having presided over a more prosperous and secure country, and continues to lead Biden in polls.
Philip D. Zelikow, the lawyer who served as the executive director of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks, said the Biden administration moved too quickly to put the pandemic behind it.
“Since the Biden administration never conducted an investigation of the crisis,” Zelikow said, “and also the Biden administration never developed a serious package of reforms to react to the crisis, the administration basically left the impression that it accepted that the government had failed, but just didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Many Americans, of all political persuasions, do not want to revisit that difficult and deadly period. Ryan Hagen, who runs an oral history project documenting the pandemic at Columbia University, said it became difficult to get the participants in his study to continue speaking to the researchers as the crisis wound down.
“The pandemic is everywhere in general in this election and nowhere specific, because it sets the conditions under which this campaign is unfolding,” he said. “Even though hardly any of us talk about it, we are all living in its shadows.”