Will the coronavirus affect this year’s presidential election?

Published March 6, 2020 

The Context:

As the number of Americans infected with the coronavirus has continued to climb – including three new cases in Montgomery County, which is just north of Washington, D.C. – some have speculated that the virus will affect the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Could it?

The health effects of the coronavirus are much more serious and weighty than its political ramifications. Still, it is an election year, and both Democrats and President Trump have been making some partisan hay out of the virus. It is thus worth at least contemplating how it might influence what happens in November.

An (admittedly brief) search in political science literature did not turn up much about the relationship between viral epidemics and election outcomes. Seth Masket, in an excellent short essay about the Ebola virus and the 2014 midterm elections, cited a few relevant studies. One study, by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, found that American voters have sometimes blamed incumbent parties and presidents for “acts of God,” though 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was not one of them.

The Social Science Facts:

This election is very crucial to the electorate and political parties. For many, this is the long waited time voters have been anxiously waiting for, to vote out Trump. Democrats seek to keep the House, gain the Senate and win the White House and for Republicans, keep the Senate, gain back the House and of course keep the impeached Republican President as Commander-in-Chief. One of the things that the electorate has learned since the election of the 45th president is that voting matters. After the nomination of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, many people felt like their votes didn't matter and there was no motivation to get people out to vote. The final results of the day after the presidential election in November of 2016 changed everyone's minds. "The collective action problem of moving the electorate for voting, “people don’t have a reason to vote in their minds because they don’t see it makes any difference.  And until they get a sense that their voice matters they’re not going to have a great an incentive to participate.” (Aldrich) The day after the election we saw thousands of people across the country marching against the election of Donald Trump and after Trumps inauguration, the women's march, was one of the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

The 2018 Midterm elections results were the results of voters going out to cast their ballots because there was that sense of urgency that their votes mattered and they did. Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in 2018.

As we continue moving forward towards the November elections, people continue to have that sense of urgency to vote. It's true we are officially living in a pandemic due to COVID-19 not one state in the Union is free from the virus. But that's not going to stop voters from casting their ballots this November. Voting and COVID-19 actions have been taken into consideration and there are several ways to cast ballots while we live through this pandemic, we are seeing these alternatives during the Democratic primaries already.

We're still eight months away from the elections and a lot can happen one thing that we will witness for sure is will political parties lead the way or will they follow the public opinion of the electorate? (Leeper & Slothuus)