https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/us/politics/trump-election-covid-2020.html
NEWSLETTER
On Politics
The Second Pandemic Election
Covid cost Trump the presidency in 2020, and it may have cleared the path for his
return.
President-elect Donald J. Trump at his election night party. Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Jess Bidgood, The New York Times Online Edition, November 7, 2024.
The day after an election can bring an uncanny quiet.
After months — even years — of frenzied campaign activity, nonstop ads and raucous
campaign rallies, comes a day when the nation looks into the mirror and into its future.
My colleagues on the Politics desk and across The Times worked through the night and
on into the morning to bring you coverage of President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive
victory, a return to power that has already plunged this country into a new era of
uncertainty. In picking Trump, voters have elevated a once-banished political figure who
has promised to govern as a strongman and upend the nation’s handling of
the economy, public health and foreign affairs — and they probably helped to keep him
out of prison.
There is a lot to process, no matter which outcome you wanted.
If there is one image that sticks in my mind as I sift through all of it — one image that is
most important to understanding how and why Trump is returning to power — it’s not a
picture of the president-elect. Rather, it’s this graphic, which shows how much better he
did across much of the country last night, compared with his failed presidential bid in
2020.
Early Results Show a Red Shift Across the U.S.
Of the counties with nearly complete results, more than 90 percent shifted in favor of former President Donald J.
Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
This is a country going through a big change.
It will be a long time before we can say exactly why a country that decisively rejected
Trump four years ago welcomed him back last night — and the answer is going to be
complicated. But it is possible, I think, that the same thing that cost Trump the
presidency in 2020 played at lease some role in clearing a path for his return in 2024:
the pandemic.
In 2020, Covid-19 upended American life, killing 385,000 people in a year and sending
the American economy into a recession. Trump’s chaotic and dismissive handling of a
public health crisis that had made life almost unrecognizable is part of why voters
rejected him that year.
When President Biden came into office and vaccines made Covid less lethal, much of
public was eager to forget what had happened. But whether people talked about it, the
pandemic had already set into motion some of the forces that would make President
Biden’s term in office rocky. It spurred global supply chain shocks that sent inflation
soaring. In the years that followed, the public’s faith in institutions eroded, and Trump
and his allies sought to weaponize that distrust.
Communities had fierce battles over school closures and curriculums. People worried
about political violence and their economic future. There was also a political backlash
against the racial justice protests that had unfolded during the pandemic’s first year.
“Covid, in many ways, walked into this country’s tribal politics, and really put it on
steroids,” said Doug Sosnik, a longtime Democratic strategist who believes the election
results portend the country’s biggest shift to the right since Ronald Reagan’s victory in
1980.
When I called Sosnik, he reminded me of the period in 2021 when Biden’s approval
ratings tanked and never quite recovered. On July 4, once vaccines had been widely
distributed, he declared “independence” from the virus, even though cases would
continue to surge and disrupt American life. That August, the U.S. withdrawal from
Afghanistan became the first foreign policy calamity of his presidency. And in
September, the Consumer Price Index climbed 5.4 percent from the prior year.
That moment created political problems for Biden. But it was a sign of a bigger and
more fundamental reshaping of American life, as people chafed at rising prices, a sharp
rise in housing costs put a basic element of the American dream out of reach, and
people’s distrust of the government and one another only hardened. Voters on both
sides began to ask big questions about whether the government — and democracy itself
— was really working for them.
This is not the only country where the long tail of the pandemic has hurt incumbent
parties. Slow growth and rising prices have dealt political blows to leaders in Britain,
France, Germany and Japan. The American recovery was stronger than those nations’ —
but, my colleague Jim Tankersley wrote today, it still wasn’t enough.
In 2020, as voters put on masks and cast ballots by mail, the effects of the pandemic
were obvious, and Biden promised to offer change.
But maybe 2024 unfolded in a country just as upended by the pandemic, even if it was
less obvious to the naked eye. This time, though, Biden — and then Harris —
represented the status quo, offering little in the way of transformative ideas that would
fix what four years of malaise had wrought.
This time, Trump was able to run as the candidate of change.
“Republicans are poised to have unified government,” Speaker Mike Johnson predicted on Wednesday.
Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Meanwhile, in House races …
Republicans won the White House. They won the Senate. The only remaining question is
whether they’ll have unified government — and that depends on what’s happening in House
races that could take days or weeks to call. I asked my colleague Catie Edmondson, who
covers Congress for The Times, to explain where things stand.
JB: If Democrats take back the House, they would be able to stymie President-elect
Trump’s legislative priorities right out of the gate. How likely is that to happen?
CE: There are a number of districts where the Democratic incumbents have held on
despite the red wave sweeping the country in general, and House Minority Leader
Hakeem Jeffries said this afternoon that he believes his party has a path to reclaim the
House.
But to do that, they would need to sweep a number of close races — and that has left
Democrats I have been talking to increasingly pessimistic about their ability to ward off
a Republican trifecta.
How far are we from a call?
It’s really hard to tell, because there are at least a couple of races that strategists have
indicated will go to a recount. I think it’s also an open question as to how long it takes
officials in California to count races that Democrats are hoping to win.
Tell us about a district that sums up the Democrats’ problems.
In Pennsylvania, Democratic incumbents like Representative Susan Wild and
Representative Matt Cartwright have conceded to Republican opponents, although The
Associated Press hasn’t yet called those races. Those contests, in the Allentown and
Scranton areas, are emblematic of the party’s struggles with working-class voters.
Democrat Eugene Vindman won Virginia’s Seventh District — but it was a close race.
That’s a district that shows how Democrats just didn’t excel with suburban voters as
much as they needed to offset losses elsewhere.
Are there any districts that have surprised you?
In Maine’s largely rural Second District, Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat, has
declared victory. His race hasn’t been called, but a win would mean he found a way to
outperform Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost in his district.
Another bright spot for Democrats came in New York. The party was set back on its
heels in 2022, when they took a lot of blame nationally for losing races that effectively
cost Democrats the House. Last night, they flipped at least two seats, even though
Trump improved his performance in the state overall since 2020.
Jess Bidgood is a managing correspondent for The Times and writes the On Politics newsletter, a
guide to the 2024 election and beyond. More about Jess Bidgood
Our Coverage of the 2024 Election
The Presidential Race
• ‘Trump’s America’: Donald Trump’s comeback victory has established him as
a transformational force reshaping the United States in his own image.
• How Trump Won: Trump gambled that his grievances would become the
grievances of the MAGA movement, and then the G.O.P., and then more than
half the country.
• Will a Woman Ever Be President?: After Kamala Harris lost the election to
Trump, some women wondered if the glass ceiling would ever break.
Other Results
• Senate: With a decisive margin in the Senate, an emboldened Republican
majority is ready to empower Trump.
• House: Republicans made early gains in their drive to maintain control of the
House, though the fate of the majority remains unclear.
• Abortion Ballot Measures: Abortion rights found support at the ballot box in
seven states, but fell short in three contests.
More Coverage and Analysis
• NATO: Another Trump term could spur Europe’s efforts to stand on its own, but it
is far from clear its leaders will seize the moment this time.
• China: With Trump’s return, Beijing is expecting more volatility and competition
with the United States, though a lackluster economy may limit China’s options
for pushing back.
• Biden’s Legacy: In the wake of Trump’s victory, many Democrats are casting
President Biden as a one-term president who set his party on a path to failure.
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