COVID-19, Black Lives Matter And The 2020 Election
The major news headlines throughout this past summer have been the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the protests in response to the police killings of Black Americans such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. These headlines are also likely to be key factors in shaping this year’s presidential election.
For instance, recent political science research published in Science Advances by Christopher Warshaw, Lynn Vavreck, and Ryan Baxter-King shows that areas with higher COVID-19 fatalities are less likely to support Trump and Republicans down-ballot. Other work by Warshaw and Justin de Benedictis-Kessner shows that poor economic performance hurts the president’s party across all levels of office. With the pandemic responsible for one of the largest periods of unemployment in recent history, this research suggests that the pandemic and the subsequent recession likely have pushed the odds away from Trump and toward Biden. (Indeed, the economy was one of Trump’s last remaining advantages in FiveThirtyEight’s forecast.)
As for the other major news story — this summer’s wave of Black Lives Matter protests in response to Black Americans killed by police — data collected by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman demonstrates that less than 5 percent of these protests had any associated property damage or protester/police injuries. This is significant because prior research has found that peaceful protests around issues of racial justice tend to benefit Democrats at the office. Of course, we don’t know how voters perceived the protests, but there doesn’t seem to have been evidence that a backlash against the BLM movement hurt Biden earlier this summer. If anything, it boosted his numbers in the polls for a bit.
Moreover, these protests have made issues of structural racism and police accountability more salient — even if support among white Americans has dipped back down. Among Biden supporters, at least, racial inequality is seen as one of the most important issues facing the U.S.