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

The mask has slipped (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The mask has slipped (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)


November 16, 2024   4 mins

Donald Trump is back in the White House — and among Democrats, the blame game has already begun. Nancy Pelosi, for instance, has claimed that Joe Biden should have held off supporting Kamala Harris, instead encouraging an open primary. Harris had barely started her farewell address before Bernie Sanders issued a statement condemning the Democrats for abandoning working people. Yet amid the wallowing recriminations, there’s a risk that the progressive wing of American politics sees its recent defeat only as a function of the last six months.

In truth, though, their weaknesses were clear four years ago. For while Trump was certainly defeated in 2020, this had little to do with his policy programme, or even his personal ratings. Rather, it is likely that he only lost because of a pandemic no one foresaw, and one that’s unlikely to boost his enemies again soon. This fact has lessons both for Trump himself, and for his opponents.

The strongest evidence that Trump could have won four years ago is the result of the election itself. Between 2016 and 2020, the once-and-future president improved his share of the popular vote from 46.1% to 46.8%. That, to be sure, was well short of the 51.2% that Biden won. But what counts in presidential elections isn’t the popular vote but the electoral college. And here the 2020 race was much closer. Four years ago only 44,000 votes across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin prevented a tie in the electoral college.

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.

“Whatever less partisan historians finally conclude about Trump’s handling of Covid, in the absence of the pandemic it would obviously not have mattered.”

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.


Michael Lind is a columnist at Tablet and a fellow at New America. His latest book is Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America.


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Paul MacDonnell
Paul MacDonnell
23 days ago

Inflation was not beyond their control. They caused it. It was entirely foreseeable what would happen when they dumped trillions of dollars into the economy.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
23 days ago

The general stimulus checks, each of which Trump insisted on putting his own re-produced signature to, placed the single greatest burden on the U.S. economy. And few who are determined to endorse Trump no matter what can admit this simple fact. In truth, the checks had broad bi-partisan support and they’re one of the few things I’m willing to give him credit for. Stay tuned for your economic and societal miracle administration. And pay close attention.

Thomas Wagner
Thomas Wagner
21 days ago
Reply to  AJ Mac

My read is that Trump’s two checks — $1200 in March 2020, $600 in December 2020 — produced minimal inflation. They were used to purchase goods that already existed — groceries, gasoline, rent and stranded inventory — and therefore didn’t cause demand-pull inflation.
Biden’s $1400 checks just three months later in March 2021, dropped into a market where inventories had been cleared, the supply of gasoline was suddenly uncertain (stopping fracking and drilling leases) and production of anything other than essentials was being tied up by COVID lockdowns. Suddenly demand-pull flared up, just as a good many economists predicted.
A smaller payment directed to the jobless and needy might have been necessary, if slightly inflationary. $1400 to everyone was throwing a gallon of gasoline on the campfire.

AJ Mac
AJ Mac
21 days ago
Reply to  Thomas Wagner

That’s a convenient read for Trump fans. I’m not saying there is zero validity to it, but it seems grossly one sided. You acknowledge there was already a “campfire”.

But perhaps you or another apologist will next argue that Trump handled Covid with skill, grace, and statesmanship—forgetting that he was and remains quite devoid of these qualities.

I’m not saying that Biden has been great or that Harris would have. But apart from nostalgic revisionism, Trump was quite bad at being president, and I expect he’ll be far worse this time around. The idea that he’ll heal the world and somehow end corruption with corruption sounds absurd to me. I hope he proves me wrong. Let’s all stay tuned.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
22 days ago

Trump has been strengthened by not winning in 2020. Had he won, his second term would have been a continuation of the mess that his first term was. The break of 4 years has given Trump two advantages. Firstly, he has been given time to reflect on what went wrong in his first term. Secondly, the lawfare and assassination attempts raised his credibility amongst those marginalised groups that are normally on the receiving end of the US justice system.

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
22 days ago

Trump was most certainly not defeated in 2020. Of the four most scandalous/controversial US Presidential elections (1876, 1960, 2000 and 2020), 2020 was by far the most scandalous. The way the Democrats used Covid as cover to change or simply ignore electoral law was beyond scandalous in fact. It was not how the votes were counted but how they were cast that was the problem. It has been well documented. The fact that Trump won again in 2024 might be down to better policing of the rules this time (we will have to wait for the books) but there is no doubt that he should now be completing his second term. Were that the case, we would have been spared the Ukraine War. The world, and especially Ukraine, has paid a high price for the Democrats’ cheating in 2020.

Konstantinos Stavropoulos
Konstantinos Stavropoulos
22 days ago

I find this article very mild on the (un)democrat’s misbehavior. I am pretty convinced that COVID would have been a small issue, if any at all, had Tramp not been the target of the “machinery”..! The COVID madness plus the BLM Chaos were the two heavy weapons against Tramp. It would have most probably been much easier to gain the heart of Donald Tramp had they tried to..! It seems though they were and remain so paranoid holding on to power that they couldn’t accept a president with an opinion..!

Pequay
Pequay
21 days ago

As it turns out, the Biden chapter may all be for the best. The behaviour of previously trusted institutions during COVID lifted the scales from peoples’ eyes, and the last four years have brought the American public economic hardship, increased global instability, a vision of what the modern dems think of democratic processes, weaponised lawfare, DEI and social insanity. And the people aren’t stupid- they have spoken, and they’ve spoken loudly. I’m sure Trump has learned much over the last 8 years, and this time he has some very good people around him.

J Bryant
J Bryant
23 days ago

I suspect some academics and politics wonks overthink Biden’s victory in 2020. He was elected because he wasn’t Trump, simple as that. Trump was tone deaf to some voters during the pandemic, especially older voters. People were scared and Trump wasn’t sufficiently reassuring (that’s really not his style). Biden seemed like a safe, moderate, reassuring choice.
Biden/Harris lost four years later because the electorate received a four-year lesson on what rule by the modern, progressive Democratic party means.

Paul MacDonnell
Paul MacDonnell
23 days ago
Reply to  J Bryant

The Biden administration was a caricature of what the Republican campaign said would happen if he won.

Nathan Sapio
Nathan Sapio
23 days ago

Spot on

Brett H
Brett H
23 days ago

I tend to agree with the connection of Covid to the 2020 election. No one really knew how to deal with it. We all know what happened and how. As far as I know Trump did very little that should have been done differently. However in some ways it’s better he have his second term now rather than then.

Johann Strauss
Johann Strauss
23 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

My gut tells me that things happen for a reason. For whatever reason Trump lost in 2020, I think the 4 year sabbatical will ensure that the upcoming administration will accomplish far more significant things than had he had a contiguous 2nd term. Now Trump knows what’s what and has assembled an outstanding team. Yes, the usual people will claim his cabinet picks are unqualified (Peter Hesgeth) or Russian assets (Tulsi Gabbard) or nutcases (RFK Jr), but I would argue that these picks are exactly what’s needed to clean house in Washington DC.

Pyra Intihar
Pyra Intihar
12 days ago
Reply to  Johann Strauss

Don’t forget the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)! That’s the one thing that probably wouldn’t have happened with a consecutive Trump win in 2020. Instead, we all saw the Democrat nonsense and government spending these last four years, which is what made the discussion possible to a wider audience. The fact that Elon and Vivek are heading it up is perfect because they are DC-outsiders.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
21 days ago
Reply to  Brett H

Trump did very little that should have been done differently? Warp Speed was a HUGE error. Why did he bring Dr. Atlas on board if he wasn’t going to seriously consider and weigh his recommendations? When legitimate voices, people who were actually practicing medicine in the clinical setting not ivory tower wonks like fauci and berks, were raising concerns about the approach being taken, they were discredited and sidelined.

I’m still waiting for a humble Trump to admit his error.

Michael Askew
Michael Askew
22 days ago

This time round Donald Trump seems mellowed by the campaign of harrassment and lawfare against him, not to mention the Hitler rhetoric that doubtless prompted some gun owners to think that assassination was entirely appropriate. He appears more collegiate than before and has assembled an impressive team. One hopes that he will be less chaotic than before, and achieve some of the drastic changes he has announced in an attempt to restore sanity.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
21 days ago

Actually his handling of the pandemic and Operation Warp Speed were disastrous. The fallout from that epic misstep will be felt for generations.

If he thinks simply handing us RFK Jr as nominee for Director of HHS will be a panacea, he’s quite mistaken. Elephants are reported to have long memories.

George Venning
George Venning
20 days ago

Yes and yes and fair enough but, then, WTAF is this?

“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.”

Wasn’t there someone else who was running at that point? Oh, wait, yes, the person who was, by many accounts, leading the race for the nomination in 2020 – Bernard Sanders.
He may have been the leftmost candidate in the field but he was emphatically not unpopular. Indeed he polled well in putative match ups against Trump (just has he had in the 2016 cycle).
Oddly, rather than capitalise on his successful formula of straightforwardly left-populist economics shorn of “woke” overlay, the Democratic party routinely undermined his campaign, culminating in the co-ordinated withdrawal of all the other “centre-left” candidates (to clear that lane for Biden) whilst Warren stayed in (dividing the votes of the economic left).
The truth is, that, for 20 years, the Dems have asserted their right to the votes of everyone to the left of the political divide whilst actively resisting the implementaiton of left policies. What did Obama run on? Cleaning up Wall Street, closing Guantanamo, and healthcare reform.
What did he do? He bailed out Wall Street, screwed homeowners, expanded America’s foreign wars, not least through a programme of drone-based assassination, kept Guantanamo open and implemented a model of “healthcare reform” that he borrowed off the Heritage Foundation.
The Democratic operation is distilled political grift, its cycnicism camouflaged by ever more desperate cultural conformity and the ritualised repetition of the assertion that the other guy is even worse.
The wheels are falling off both off those propositions. And the result is that even a candidate as rubbish as Trump romps home – even as the voters give a big thumbs up to measures that the Dems could have run on but didn’t (the protection of abortion rights and a $15 minimum wage)

stacy kaditus
stacy kaditus
19 days ago

What a windbag