The Great Lockdown and Economic Voting: Estimating the Impact of the COVID-19 Recession on the 2020 US Presidential Election

Abstract

The 2020 US presidential election was won by Democrat challenger Joseph Biden over Republican incumbent Donald Trump and was contested during the global Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Unemployment increased sharply during the pandemic but was followed by a large federal relief package. We investigate whether there was economic voting in the 2020 election, that is, whether the increased unemployment rate and the subsequent government response during the pandemic affected Trump’s vote negatively or positively overall. We examine 48 states (by excluding Alaska, Hawaii, and DC). Using a triple-differences (DDD) model (that is, examining changes in a candidate’s county-level vote-share depending on the change in unemployment and historical Republican-Democrat partisanship), we predict what would have happened if the increase in unemployment rate in between March and October 2020 had been more modest. Although many states show significant negative expected impacts on the Trump vote, we predict that only when when the unemployment rates experience little change during the pandemic would overall results have swung in the incumbent’s favour – and only then in Arizona and Georgia.