Pandemic Politics Won't Rescue President Biden in 2024
2024 is not 2020.
Despite his awful polls, President Joe Biden’s defenders claim that he will beat Donald Trump again in November, because he did it in 2020. I believe that thinking is flawed. It ignores the exceptional pandemic politics of 2020 that, in my view, helped a deeply flawed, unpopular man achieve a narrow victory over Trump.
The arrival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus made 2020 an abnormal year for people around the world, but also for U.S. presidential politics. Here’s how Biden got a boost from the pandemic — and why this year is unlikely to be as kind to him:
First, he was able to campaign from the basement. Even in 2020, many Americans were concerned about Biden’s cognitive capacity and age. Bizarre incidents during the primary where Biden lashed out at voters, activists, and journalists — yelling, mocking, grabbing, poking, and other inappropriate behaviors — led some to believe the former vice president was not the same man that he was at the end of Barack Obama’s second term. It’s notable that Neera Tanden, a senior campaign adviser who now serves as Biden’s domestic policy czar, frequently defended his personal capacity on the X platform. When lockdowns arrived in March 2020, however, Biden’s campaign went virtual from his Delaware basement, save for a few socially distanced town halls and drive-in rallies.
This pivot to remote allowed Biden to avoid challenging in-person interactions, almost certainly sparing the campaign disturbing viral videos like those I’ve linked to above. Moreover, the president’s remarkable frailty was not on display when he participated in “events” like “virtual rope lines.” Nonetheless, there were still some cringeworthy moments, such as Biden calling a journalist “a junkie” for asking whether he had taken a cognitive test and suggesting that Black Americans “ain’t Black” if they don’t vote for him. Given these painful incidents emerged from the low-stress basement environment, it’s not hard to imagine even worse things happening during a normal campaign with frequent in-person events.
The second way Biden’s electoral fortunes were boosted by pandemic politics was that he was able to hyper-focus on Trump’s management of Covid as an overarching negative theme. Biden’s strategy was to personally blame Trump for 200,000 deaths, mass unemployment, and closed schools. If you look back at the election’s debates and speeches, the pandemic was clearly the dominant theme and other issues were marginalized as a result.
The centrality of the pandemic management theme meant that significant early and mail-in voting was auspicious for Biden. To be clear, I’m not winking at election denialists, but making an entirely different point. Before early November 2020, it appeared to many Americans that European countries were benefiting from the draconian spring lockdowns that Republicans eschewed on this side of the Atlantic. There was a widely held belief that responsible Europeans — led by “good leaders” like Angela Merkel — “did the work” to avoid a dramatic second wave while Americans had failed under Trump’s leadership. Of course, this was more rhetoric than reality.
I was traveling in Europe in October and November 2020. Cases were surging, hospitalizations were rising, and lockdowns and curfews were returning across the continent. But the perception remained in America that our pandemic results were bad due to poor presidential leadership and not, say, pre-pandemic population health and weak welfare institutions. If the election had taken place in December — with vaccines approved and widespread public awareness that the virus was surging everywhere once again — would Biden still have won? It’s worth seriously reflecting on the degree to which the pandemic — and public perceptions of its management by the Trump administration — benefited Biden in 2020.
Four years later, it’s 2024, and anger about Covid cases has been replaced by frustration with inflation. The social and economic conditions of 2020 no longer exist — everything is different except the two elderly men. Voters blame Biden, not Trump, for the biggest problem in their lives. Whereas Trump was scapegoated for a pandemic in 2020, Biden is now being held personally responsible for the worst inflation in decades, despite the fact it was a global phenomenon. In 2024, the dominant themes — inflation and immigration — will almost surely benefit Trump more than Biden.
With older Americans protected by vaccines, there is also now a public expectation that both candidates will engage in robust in-person campaigning, but Biden doesn’t seem willing to embrace that reality. Having skipped the Super Bowl interview for the second year in a row, it appears that Biden is now aiming for a kind of lockdown-lite campaign, which as Nate Silver has argued will probably not be enough to beat his energetic opponent. Avoiding large events and public appearances without the specter of Covid will amplify questions about Biden’s age and cognitive capacity.
In 2020, Biden campaigned from his basement — hiding his physical frailty and propensity to anger — and hyper-focused on a single negative theme for Trump, his supposed personal responsibility for mass illness and death. This year, Biden will be forced to engage in more in-person campaigning — if he fails to do so, voters will question his fitness — and navigate a policy environment that’s less favorable for him. Given this wildly different context, it strains credulity to confidently declare Biden will beat Trump in 2024, because he did so last time, but that’s exactly what Biden World seems to believe.
