Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic likely had an effect on the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election. Was it responsible for the defeat of incumbent President Donald Trump? The present study makes an initial attempt at, and provides a model for, understanding the pandemic’s influence on Trump support. The study employed a mixed experimental and correlational design and surveyed separate samples of adults (N = 1,763) in six waves beginning March 23, 2020 and ending June 1, 2020. Participants were randomly assigned to report their Trump support either before or after being reminded of the pandemic with a series of questions gauging their level of concern about it. Results revealed complex and dynamic effects that changed over time. Depending on survey wave, the pandemic seems to have lowered Trump support among Democrats, while (marginally) raising it among independents. Republicans’ reactions also changed over time; of particular note, Republicans who were more concerned about the pandemic reported higher Trump support after being reminded of the pandemic in its early stages, but this effect reversed by the time the economy began reopening (coinciding with a dip in Trump’s approval ratings). Although the correlational results in the present study did not converge neatly with the experimental results, the combined experimental and correlational approach has the potential to increase researchers’ confidence in the causal effects of salient national and international events on political attitudes.
Highlights
The 2019–2021 coronavirus pandemic has widespread psychological, sociological, and political implications
The order of the topics was counterbalanced, so that approximately half the participants were effectively primed with pandemic awareness prior to reporting their Trump support. (The correlational results in this study suggest that answering pandemic questions first did not affect the correlation between pandemic concern and Trump support, and there was no main effect of priming condition on pandemic concern.) This provides a more rigorous test of the causal effect
Separate ANOVAs conducted for each wave revealed that on March 23, pandemic priming decreased Trump support F(1, 167) = 3.88, p = .05, ηp2 = .02 (M = 2.18, SD = 1.63 vs. M = 1.74 SD = 1.23); whereas just a week later (March 30) there was no effect
Summary
The 2019–2021 coronavirus pandemic has widespread psychological, sociological, and political implications. Among these is the likely effect on people’s support for incumbent leaders, including United States President Donald Trump. Social science theories can be used to generate multiple (conflicting) predictions about this, and the 2020 U.S presidential election results are known, it is not clear what, if any, role the pandemic played in Trump’s defeat, and there is evidence to support both a negative effect of the pandemic on Trump support [1], and a positive one [2] prior to the election. The present study provides additional data that social scientists might use to help understand, retrospectively, the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on Trump support among the US electorate, and prospectively, the potential effects of future disasters on major elections.
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