How COVID Helped Trump Win

This piece was written in partnership with The Gauntlet.

On Wednesday morning, November 6, many Democrats woke up to a country they felt they barely knew. Donald Trump, a man they reviled, was once again the president-elect of the United States, having triumphed over Vice President Kamala Harris.

Observers had expected the election to come down to the wire, drawn out over days before a winner could be determined. But that did not happen. The final tally was 312 electoral votes for Trump to just 226 for Harris. The Republican had even won the popular vote by millions and his party recaptured the Senate, won most of the governorships, and also held the House of Representatives. 

Various explanations have been offered to explain how “joy” gave way to grievance: racism and sexism, Democrats going too “woke,” Harris’s strategy of trying to appeal to Republicans in the suburbs, her stance on Israel, her media strategy, the Democratic Party’s record with working people, legacy media coverage and more. But one thing that’s been largely overlooked in the agonized post-election autopsies is the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. 

The pandemic, which has killed 1.2 million Americans to date—40,000 so far this year as of the week of October 12—has hardly been top of mind lately. Media has largely moved on—even if immunocompromised and vulnerable Americans cannot thanks to the still-circulating virus. COVID, far from its political branding as a mere inconvenience, has been linked to a host of serious health complications including diabetes and cardiovascular and neurological problems. But the Biden administration’s response to the worst public health crisis in a century likely played a significant role in Donald Trump’s return to the White House. 

In many ways, 2024 was the second COVID election.

Broken Promises

Joe Biden had his work cut out for him when he took the Oath of Office that cold January day in 2021. The nation was deeply divided and in the previous 11 months, more than 400,000 Americans had lost their lives to a deadly airborne virus. 

Not only had President Trump been late in responding to the threat, he had downplayed it in the name of getting the country back open ahead of the 2020 election. He targeted state governors who implemented basic viral control measures like stay-at-home orders, suggesting they were threats to liberty; he publicly scoffed at the need for masks and encouraged the use of quack treatments. His administration embraced and helped promote an unworkable, fringe herd immunity strategy reliant on mass infection.

On the other hand, he did sign into law the most generous expansions of the social safety net in decades with the various COVID relief bills that crossed his desk. These included provisions for expanding broadband access, an expansion of the child tax credit, several expanded unemployment assistance programs, paid leave, and more. He also fast-tracked vaccine development leading to the mRNA COVID shots, which have prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths. 

Nevertheless, he oversaw a bloodbath, particularly compared to countries with stricter protections like Australia and New Zealand. Hundreds of thousands died due to lax and confusing measures, constantly undercut by bombastic Republican messaging, which varied widely between states. By the time Trump got seriously ill with COVID in October 2020, the nation was ready for new leadership. 

On the campaign trail, Biden promised to be a different kind of leader. He would be steady and follow the science, shutting the country down if necessary. One way or another, he would end the crisis humanely; his promises were premised on the idea that economic recovery depended on public safety. He would mobilize key agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers from forcible infections, and would make schools safe for children. 

On the promise of stability—and with credibility leftover from the Obama administration—Biden won in a landslide, taking back the Blue Wall and thrashing Trump by 7 million votes nationwide. His party, meanwhile, won the House and Senate, and scored key victories in the state races in a census year, ensuring fairer legislative maps for the next decade.

But once in office, Biden’s pandemic management strategy looked very familiar. Instead of following the science and putting workers’ lives before corporate profits, reopening was always the first priority of the new administration, as it had been under the previous one. Armed with the new COVID vaccines and positive early data indicating they were 90 percent effective at preventing transmission of the disease, the new administration decided, as one staffer told The Washington Post, to “vaccine our way out” of the crisis. Without waiting to assess whether vaccine efficacy would wane with time (it did) or whether COVID would quickly mutate around vaccine protection (it did), the political project of “ending the pandemic” began. Nonpharmaceutical interventions and the layered protection strategy many public health experts had been hoping for went out the window as the president moved to put the crisis in the rearview, declare victory, and move on. 

A more holistic approach would have seen a push for clean indoor air—something that would also have prepared us for outbreaks of future airborne pandemics, like say, an H5N1 bird flu outbreak. By now, we could have had CO2 monitoring and HEPA filtration as our “new normal,” as well as public education about these tools. 

Among the many casualties of this vaccine-only approach was federal pandemic relief. Key programs began expiring shortly after Biden took office without a fight from Democrats. The last round of stimulus payments went out with his American Rescue Plan in March 2021 and were notably $600 shy of the $2,000 he and his party had promised during the Georgia runoffs—Democrats defended the discrepancy by noting that in December, $600 checks had already gone out (with Donald Trump’s name on them). Other programs would quickly follow suit like the Small Business Administration’s restaurant revitalization fund, which ran dry in March 2021. The Paycheck Protection Program ended that May. 

In August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium lapsed, prompting freshman Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush to lead a protest on the steps of the Capitol. While she briefly succeeded in shaming the administration into announcing a 60-day extension of protections, the right-wing Supreme Court ultimately killed the plan. The next month, the expanded unemployment programs came to an end.

Outside a brief surge in March and April 2021, during which time Biden called on states to impose mask mandates, nationwide COVID deaths throughout much of this period were generally on the decline. In May, the CDC issued new guidance that the vaccinated need not wear masks in most situations and on Independence Day, Biden declared independence from COVID was around the counter. At town halls that month, the president assured Americans, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the IC unit, and you’re not going to die” and “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” 

But trouble was brewing. Weekly COVID deaths had started to surge again in July, driven by the new Delta variant, having hit their low the week of July 3. As the days grew shorter and the summer season drew to a close, the numbers grew higher and the president’s optimism looked quaint. In August, the administration announced a booster campaign, realizing that vaccine-induced immunity waned over time. The week of September 4 saw deaths reach their zenith at nearly 15,500. 

Still, like the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign slogan, Biden would not go back. He would not call for a national mask mandate or reconsider shutdowns or more pandemic relief. Instead, the administration would step up testing and impose vaccine mandates. 

In November 2021, the broadband accessibility program shut down. At the end of the following month came the end of the expanded child tax credit, once the centerpiece of Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The program had been even more generous than what existed under Trump and slashed child poverty in half. Unlike other relief, Biden did try to extend the CTC. With the program’s demise, all of its progress was erased. 

By December, the Delta surge had subsided but another devastating COVID wave had hit the U.S. Despite being initially billed as a “milder” variant, Omicron would ultimately kill more Americans than its immediate predecessor due its infectiousness . Vice President Kamala Harris remarked that the administration had been “surprised” by both waves. Yet, even Omicron did not lead them to adjust their reopening strategy. That month the CDC shortened its COVID isolation guidance from 10 days to 5 amid pressure from the airline industry.

The only real change to the White House strategy came as a result of massive public pressure following White House spokesperson Jen Psaki mocking a reporter at a press conference for suggesting the administration ought to be distributing free tests. Following backlash from the incident, the administration announced it would do just that, sending a limited number of tests per household. However, they would not go out for weeks.

In Biden’s December 2021 jobs report, delivered in early January 2022, the president boasted about reopening the economy, noting that his administration had "got people out of their homes and back to work, even in the face of wave after wave of COVID."

Omicron marked a turning point. The administration shifted to normalizing life with the virus. In March 2022, the CDC changed the metric and color scheme of its county COVID heat map, concealing viral spread from the public. Whereas the old map was based solely on transmission and displayed a scale of blue to red indicating low to high, the new one would incorporate hospital capacity and run pastel green to pastel orange. Suddenly, the alarmingly red U.S. was a pleasant light green.

The normalization of forever COVID, however, did not include any major changes to protect workers from the persistent threat to their health. Experts like Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves were calling for things like clean indoor air rules and universal paid leave, but these voices went ignored. Biden’s promised universal OSHA standard never materialized.

Finally, in May 2023, the pandemic emergency declaration came to an end, marked as a sort of victory moment by Biden. But the end of the emergency also meant an end to Medicaid’s open enrollment requirement that had effectively expanded eligibility. It was not long before states began to purge their Medicaid rolls. As many as 20 million Americans lost coverage in 2023. Five months later, the student loan repayment freeze came to an end, meaning that for millions of borrowers, they now had another expense to deal with. 

Leaving the Door Open

The success—or lack thereof—of Biden’s COVID response can be measured by the numbers. Throughout his term, the virus continued mutating, disabling, and killing Americans in droves. To date, more than 800,000 have died from COVID since Biden took the oath of office, more than double the number that were lost under Trump—and most within a similar timeframe. When the U.S. crossed the million-death mark in early May 2022, Biden led in average weekly deaths, even when we attribute deaths before June to his predecessor. The long COVID numbers are estimated in the tens of millions and disability cases have risen significantly since 2020.

In November 2021, Dr. Fauci told CNBC, “I think if we can get well below 10,000 [COVID cases per day], I think that would be a level that I think would be acceptable to us to get back to a degree of normality.” He anticipated that, following the Delta wave, COVID cases would fall and stay low, presumably due to a mixture of vaccine-induced and infection-induced immunity. While the U.S. no longer tracks infection numbers with the advent of at-home tests, wastewater data suggests that the U.S. has likely never seen a single day with under 100,000 cases in the three years since. Neither vaccines, nor infections, could induce longer-term immunity to COVID infection.This summer’s wave saw over a thousand Americans dying each week putting to bed administration claims that COVID would become a “seasonal” virus. In other words, the Biden administration’s pandemic strategy failed on its own terms.

Beyond the devastating human toll, the Biden administration’s COVID response was political malpractice for Democrats and laid the groundwork for Trump’s return. The expiration of COVID relief meant that millions of Americans who had been receiving aid from the federal government under Trump lost it under Biden. The virus continued wreaking havoc on the workforce right as inflation was taking off and the Federal Reserve was hiking interest rates. Many Americans who had managed to save money during the early days of pandemic exhausted those savings by September 2021. The combination of rising prices and loss of relief more than likely fed many Americans’ negative perceptions of the recovering economy.

While Biden did sign major pieces of legislation aimed at creating jobs—the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act—their benefits would take years to be fully realized. 

Then there were the optics. At multiple points throughout his presidency, Biden’s proclamations about the pandemic did not pan out. The president himself caught COVID in July 2022, a month after inflation hit its peak. In an interview with Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky made the out-of-touch announcement that Biden would not follow her agency’s new 5-day isolation guidance, instead staying quarantined until he tested negative, because he had the resources to do so. When Walensky herself caught COVID that fall, she isolated for nearly three weeks. The administration’s obvious floundering with the pandemic and failure to deliver on Biden’s promise to end it had the effect of dulling the edge of Trump’s mismanagement. 

Equally important is the impact Biden’s optimistic messaging had on the national pandemic discourse. With their president claiming victory over the crisis and touting his great economic recovery, Democrats fell into lockstep with the administration. For liberal America, COVID was a thing of the past, leaving a void that the political right was quick to fill.

Right-wing dark money groups had been working to undermine public health efforts against COVID from the outset of the pandemic, casting stay-at-home orders as an assault on freedom and promoting false claims downplaying the seriousness of the virus. They advocated for a hand-off approach, letting nature take its course. 

When Democrats stopped talking about COVID, the right did not. Instead, right-wing operatives, dark money groups, media, and politicians worked to create an alternate reality in which the discredited positions they adopted throughout the pandemic—minimizing the virus and opposing mitigation measures—were vindicated. And so, for example, as the administration failed to message about the more serious outcomes of COVID infection, like cardiovascular problems, the right was quick to cast them as vaccine side-effects. With the White House seemingly afraid to call for masking, the right proclaimed masks ineffective. And after four years of arguing that the 800,000 deaths Biden oversaw were no big deal, could the Democrats blame the public for no longer caring much about 400,000 deaths under Trump?

Meanwhile, groups like New Civil Liberties Alliance launched lawsuits against the administration over alleged “censorship” of right-wing medical voices like Stanford Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on social media. Other groups, like the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, began giving them awards for standing up against alleged government pressure. Collateral Global, a UK-based anti-lockdown group, funded a health policy symposium at Stanford featuring right-wing operatives and anti-vaxxers. For its part, the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic began “investigating” the federal COVID response, looking into an alleged cover-up of the lab leak, or censorship of right-wing voices. The body has hauled in credible scientists over their alleged role in malfeasance. 

Of course, on Elon Musk’s Twitter and podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience, the right’s alternate reality found a home and algorithmic amplification. COVID skepticism became an effective recruitment tool—the tip of the spear—for right-wing ideology.

The Biden Administration’s approach to COVID was a vaccine-first, vaccine-only pursuit of herd immunity. When herd immunity was not achieved via vaccine, Biden’s administration proceeded, full steam ahead, with their plans to dismantle every pandemic era protection that existed to assist people during the crisis. As people lost healthcare, they also got sicker, with schools across the country reporting record absences. As unemployment and student loan programs ran dry, millions of people began experiencing new long-term health problems, whether or not they understood that these problems were a result of a previous COVID infection. As disability numbers continued to climb, so did homelessness, which hit a record high in 2023. 

It is far easier to remove things like masks and tests from public view than it is to remove the downstream effects of continual reinfections. 

It’s remarkable that so few in the Democratic Party saw an iceberg ahead with the Biden COVID response. If anyone with any political power did, they mostly kept quiet about it, including progressives. Ultimately, their silence came at the expense of Kamala Harris.

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