Remember the pandemic? Voters don’t
Despite more than 1 million dead, COVID-19 isn’t a factor this time
PALM BEACH, Fla. – Speaking at a rally last month, Donald Trump lauded a particular, dubious achievement of his oneterm presidency. ● “Think of the gasoline, gas prices,” the former president said that night in North Charleston, South Carolina. “We had sometimes where it was below this number, $1.87 per gallon. Doesn’t that sound good?” ● Yes, except that according to AAA, the indeed very good sounding price was registered in April 2020 – amid a global pandemic shutdown that unemployed more than 20 million Americans and closed, by one estimate, 700,000 businesses. At the time, only a dozen U.S. states saw pump prices for a gallon of regular, unleaded fuel top $2 because people weren’t driving nearly as much.
Four years later, the country is mired in another presidential election, a rematch pitting the former president against the incumbent who defeated him. Except this time, there is no social distancing and next to no one is wearing a mask. There’s also one other difference: President Joe Biden and Trump rarely even mention the pandemic.
The global coronavirus pandemic declared on March 13, 2020, ranks among the top national emergencies of the past century along with the Great Depression, the bombing of Pearl Harbor that roped Americans into World War II, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Great Recession of the late 2000s.
But while those crises dominated the public policy arena in the years and decades that followed, the COVID-19 pandemic, so fresh in the American collective memory, has been buried deep in the recesses of the U.S. electoral hippocampus.
“It’s not a great differentiator between the two of them,” Chris Tuttle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said of why neither presidential candidate can gain an advantage. “And you’re dealing with a lot of hangover effects and a generalized perception among the general public that there was an overreaction.”
Historian: Trump ‘falls short’
During his Mar-a-Lago Super Tuesday victory speech on March 5, Trump conceded “I don’t talk about that” in reference to the pandemic. He said it was “such a horrible thing” and decried the $60 trillion “worth of damage” globally.
Trump then lamented that his administration’s pandemic management has not been fully appreciated.
“We did a fantastic job on that. We never got credit for that,” he said of the response.
Presidential historian Robert Watson said there is a reason.
“In any way, shape and form, if you look at what made the greats great when there was a crisis, Trump falls short,” said Watson, who teaches at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida.
Watson said the assessment is neither partisan nor totally subjective. It’s based on long-held basics for analyses of presidential action, decision-making and legacies so often dissected in academic journals, scholarly conferences and debates over presidential rankings.
It’s the same rubric used to assess Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, or Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression, or Theodore Roosevelt and the pressure for conservation, or George H.W. Bush as the Berlin Wall collapsed, or Lyndon Johnson on civil rights.
“Every president gets a handful of really big issues that come across their plate, and those are things that separate the greats from everybody else,” he said. “In a hundred years, the first line on your bio, the legacy of a president is not something you do on a Tuesday afternoon, or a bill you signed in September. It’s the crisis stuff. It’s when the youknow-what hits the fan and how you respond to the big issues.”
There, historical analysis adjudicates based on some key markers, including whether the president sitting behind the Resolute Desk took ownership of the emergency and rallied the country with “honest and frank” discussions.
Examples, he said, were FDR’s fireside chats or Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg and second inaugural address to the nation.
Watson, who has long been a voter in C-SPAN’s presidential rankings, said that’s where Trump’s standing in history slides mightily. Scholars fault him, he said, for his erratic approach, such as promoting ill-advised treatments, calling the pandemic a “hoax” and undermining the nation’s public health experts.
“Trump tried to avoid all responsibility,” he said. “I don’t think anybody with a serious face could say that Trump was able to put a check mark in any of those boxes.”
‘One of the toughest periods’
Tuttle of the Council on Foreign Relations said Trump mentioning COVID-19 just reminds the electorate of lost livelihoods, seeing their children lonely and falling behind in their education, and the restrictions in public places they grew to despise.
“All the things that happened in the early days of the pandemic happened on Trump’s watch,” said Tuttle, who directs the New York-based think tank’s Renewing America Initiative. “That doesn’t play very well within his base, and I don’t think it plays well with a general election audience.”
It’s a double-edged sword for Biden, too.
Sure, in the State of the Union last Thursday, Biden touted the economy’s comeback from 2020, including the creation of 15 million new jobs under his administration and rock-bottom unemployment rates.
“A raging virus that took more than 1 million American lives of loved ones, millions left behind,” Biden reminded Americans as he spoke on Capitol Hill. “I came to office determined to get us through one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history. We have.”
But national frustration with supplychain disruptions and sporadic shortages – combined with an inflation rate that hit a 40-year high in 2022 – have deeply eroded confidence in the president’s ability to manage the economy.
Kevin Wagner, a political science professor and pollster at Florida Atlantic
University, noted that most polls, including the ones FAU has done in partnership with Mainstreet Research, ask about topics prevalent on voters’ minds, from immigration to incivility. COVID-19 isn’t one of them.
Wagner points out that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “tried to run on it” – on his management of the pandemic, and specifically his popular push to exit Florida from pandemic restrictions – during his presidential campaign, but “it got no traction.”
In late 2021 and early 2022, Trump touted his administration’s vaccine development under “Operation Warp Speed” but dropped the references after he was booed by otherwise adoring MAGA audiences.
“No one’s figured out exactly how to make this work for them,” Wagner said. “The issue doesn’t play well.”
Public health worth discussing
Global estimates of COVID-19 fatalities range from 5.9 million to 7 million people.
In the U.S., the figure stands at just over 1.1 million reported. So, with 4.3% of the world’s population, the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet notched a far disproportionate 17% to 20% of the deaths.
Dr. Jennifer Horney, professor and the director of the epidemiology program at the University of Delaware, cautioned the percentage may be lower when adjusting for reporting inconsistencies. The bottom line is largely indisputable, however.
“It is pretty clear, maybe not to that extent, but it is pretty clear that we had a larger share of deaths in the U.S. than proportionally should have been expected,” she said.
That’s just one reason, Horney and other health care experts and epidemiologists say, that a national conversation is needed. Not one to rehash fractious fights, but rather to bolster ongoing and future public health responses.
One area to address is funding for public health networks, a priority after the Sept. 11 attacks that has been allowed to lapse. Another is understanding the risk factors that led to a higher U.S. death rate.
A determining factor, she said, is “intersectionality” in front-line essential workers, such as those who continued to labor in meat processing and other vital industries. Those businesses did not shut down, and their workers were not afforded protective equipment and policies, let alone access to adequate health care and insurance.
“If you look at the deaths, especially early on, they were disproportionately in groups that were designated in that essential front-line workforce,” Horney said.
The country’s epidemiology workforce could also use an injection of personnel, especially with people of diverse backgrounds. Programs to provide student-loan forgiveness for people choosing public health service would be a boon, she said.
Investment in better data systems to develop more precise modeling is another wish-list item. The coronavirus response was hampered by “disjointed” analytics and informatics as data wasn’t always precise or timely, she said.
“If we could get that faster, higher quality and more complete, that would help,” Horney added, saying it would allow the knowledge the research academic side is generating to get to the practitioner on the ground who is making critical decisions on patient care.