Covid masked liberal weakness Joe Biden's win was just a fluke

Quite aside from the historical drama of such an outcome — the electoral college has never been tied in US history — America’s arcane federal constitution means the election would have gone to the House of Representatives. Each state delegation would have cast one vote for president. In 2020, the Democrats had a majority in the House, but Republicans had a 26-23 majority of state delegations, and almost certainly would have voted for a second Trump term.

But without Covid, the 2020 race might not have been that close. On the eve of the pandemic, Trump was in a remarkably strong position. For one thing, the Mueller Commission report had discredited claims that the president owed his 2016 victory to Russian interference. For another, the first of the two partisan impeachments by the Democrats had failed. A decade after the Great Recession, the economy was recovering, and Trump’s popularity ratings rose to 49%.  Then Covid struck. During the pandemic, Trump’s favourability ratings slumped. In hindsight, his handling of the disaster was far from a failure, resulting in the rapid government-backed mass production of vaccines via Operation Warp Speed. But the same alliance of Democratic politicians and establishment journalists that had falsely accused him of being a Putin stooge now hysterically called him a mass murderer, personally responsible for every Covid death in the United States.

No less striking, the pro-Democratic media twisted Trump’s comments to falsely claim that he favoured injecting bleach into Americans, disingenuously suggesting that he supported prescribing “livestock dewormer” to patients. That sounds bad until you realise he meant ivermectin: a drug prescribed across Latin America, as well as by some doctors in the US itself. Sued by some American physicians, who claimed its public pronouncements had hurt their practices, the Food and Drug Administration agreed to pay out in a settlement in March 2024. Among other things, they implicitly apologised for the 2021 tweet that warned people: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all, stop it.”

Whatever less partisan historians finally conclude about Trump’s handling of Covid, in the absence of the pandemic it would obviously not have mattered. History, for its part, points us in the same direction. Before Trump’s failure to secure the Oval Office in 2020, Obama, Bush, and Clinton had all been re-elected and served second terms. Dubya, who like Trump in 2016 had lost the popular vote but narrowly won the electoral college in 2000, went on to win the popular vote in 2004, before the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars turned the public against his administration. You could say something similar about Obama, who won re-election while pushing his country into two more quagmires in Syria and Libya.

Trump, in contrast, believed the Iraq War to be a mistake, and hadn’t involved his country in any unpopular new wars. At the same time, claims by Democrats that Trump was a dangerous warmonger collapsed when, imitating Nixon, he personally met North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un. No less striking, Trump had started the process of disengaging US forces from Afghanistan, a policy that Biden continued but ultimately bungled.

Overall, then, Trump was well-positioned to run for re-election as a president who had presided over both foreign peace and domestic prosperity. Nor do we have to rely on the President-elect alone here: his opponents were distinctly lacking too. Most of the Democrats who sought their party’s presidential nomination in 2020, from Elizabeth Warren to Pete Buttigieg, were well to the Left of the median voter and would likely have struggled outside of big cities and college towns. Unpopular among the party’s base, billionaires like Michael Bloomberg would probably not have done well either.

What about Biden himself? If the pandemic hadn’t happened, there’s plenty of evidence that he might have lost in a match-up with Trump. For one thing, he didn’t do well in the early Democratic primaries, only winning his party’s nomination when more progressive candidates dropped out. It’s not clear, meanwhile, how advanced Biden’s cognitive problems were four years ago. What is certain is that the pandemic boosted his 2020 campaign in two ways. First, it gave Biden’s handlers an excuse to minimise his public appearances, plausibly allowing them to conceal the extent of his mental decline — problems that finally became clear during his catastrophic debate with Trump in June 2024.

No less important, the pandemic allowed the Democrats to benefit from various mail-in voting systems, adopted in response to Covid lockdowns. To be clear, there is no evidence of systematic cheating here. But the combination of mail-in voting with lockdowns favoured university-educated and politically engaged Democrats at the expense of Trump’s core constituencies. Even with these advantages, at any rate, Biden still only managed to defeat Trump by a few tens of thousands of votes in swing states.

In all, this suggests that the Democrats didn’t lose last week merely because of Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or Tim Walz. Rather, they lost because they underestimated the degree to which the pandemic temporarily eclipsed the underlying popularity of Trump in particular and the Republicans in general. As the Democrats reflect on their future, it’s ironic that they were finally felled by a force beyond their control — the inflation that stalked America during Biden’s presidency.