Covid ’24 Policy | City Journal

Joe Biden’s struggle to resist growing calls from fellow Democrats and media commentators to drop out of the presidential race is just the latest, if most dramatic, wrinkle in a 2024 campaign rife with oddities. One of the least discussed is how a defining issue from four years ago — COVID policy — seems to have largely disappeared in the 2020 rematch between the candidates. It’s rare for a recent key issue to disappear so quickly from electoral politics, but that’s largely because voters overwhelmingly put the virus aside.

But Biden’s campaign is looking to revive the issue. In recent speeches and a wide-ranging TV ad campaign, President Biden has slammed Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic, an apparent attempt to stave off what his campaign sees as growing nostalgia for the former president’s term. But Biden is taking a risk, given that his own ratings for containing the virus plummeted after he took office in January 2021 — perhaps with good reason, since subsequent research has called into question much of what his administration and its health experts have advocated, much of which reflected prevailing politics in blue states.

It’s hard to remember how much the virus dominated the public conversation during the 2020 election campaign, as health officials and politicians searched for solutions and strategies varied widely across the board. But polls show how crucial it was to Biden’s victory. In a national exit poll, nearly a quarter of nearly 16,000 voters surveyed said the rise in Covid cases was this most important issue in the election, and more than six in 10 voters who thought so voted for Biden. Trump, by contrast, easily won votes from those who rated the economy and crime, two traditional primary issues, as key. Rarely has a hotly contested presidential election pivoted so much on a singular issue.

Depending on how you view Trump, Covid was either a stroke of bad luck that killed his reelection chances or a stroke of luck that exposed the weaknesses of his presidency. In early 2020, before Covid reached the United States, Trump enjoyed the highest approval rating of his term—an enviable position just months into his reelection campaign. Shortly after the virus reached American shores, his approval ratings fell, and by November, a solid majority of voters rated Biden as a better candidate than Trump to handle the pandemic.

Trump has earned some of that criticism for his early missteps, including mixed messages. First, he dismissed the threat of Covid, then warned that he would strike hard, only to urge states to reopen quickly. He has publicly sparred with some governors, notably Andrew Cuomo of New York, despite early acceptance of the advice of Anthony Fauci, who later pushed extreme lockdown strategies. Democrats have also changed their tune, initially saying they would not trust “Trump’s vaccines” but backing Biden’s vaccine mandates.

Trump’s legacy on COVID-19 is complicated. He has been criticized for deferring to states’ reopening decisions and refusing to impose draconian nationwide lockdowns; as a result, states that reopened schools and economies early fared no worse — and in some cases better — than places that kept lockdowns in place. The former president spent much of the summer of 2020 refusing to wear a mask, even as some Republicans urged him to do so, even though subsequent studies have shown that masks were at best ineffective and at worst harmful. Public health officials and the press have roundly criticized Trump for advocating for experiments with unproven treatments like ivermectin, which the FDA’s Twitter account infamously mocked as a drug for horses and cows but not for humans; however, subsequent research suggests that the drug may have a role in fighting COVID-19. All the while, the scientific community has been at pains to call Trump a major purveyor of COVID-19 disinformation.

Candidate Biden had the luxury of watching Trump waver and arguing for the opposite of much of the then-president’s actions. Biden promised, if elected, to “listen to the science,” enforce a national mask policy and insist on social distancing. Although Biden questioned Trump’s vaccine rollout, he later promised that the national rollout would be more efficient than Trump’s plan — playing both sides of the aisle. Despite Trump and Congress passing a massive Covid spending bill in early 2020, Biden has pledged to spend trillions more to lift the country out of the pandemic and spark an economic recovery. The press, not surprisingly, has widely praised Biden’s approach.

In retrospect, it’s striking how quickly Biden’s credibility on COVID-19 has eroded. When he took office, his COVID-19 policy approval rating was a solid +27 points, according to YouGov’s historical polling data; just a year later, in January 2022, that number was -12 points. By then, many Americans had grown tired of lockdowns and furious with the continued school closures, as evidence mounted that they were unnecessary and harmful. Migration data showed a huge increase in Americans moving from shuttered Democratic states to reopened and prospering Republican states. The press increasingly referred to a “post-pandemic” America, even as Biden continued to wear a mask. Covid quickly faded as an election issue.

Perhaps more importantly, as Covid faded into the background, voters’ perceptions of Biden on other issues worsened. By September 2022, polls rated the president’s performance on a dozen issues—including the economy, education, foreign policy, government spending, immigration, and crime—even lower than his work on Covid. That may tell us something about why his campaign wants to talk about the virus again.

Biden’s latest gambit feels like an exercise in the melancholy of his campaign, which has managed to pull off an election victory that seemed unlikely at the start of 2020 thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime crisis. The Biden campaign is counting on Trump to ignore its attacks because what the former president once touted as his greatest COVID-19 success — a fast-tracked campaign to develop and approve vaccines — is now viewed with far greater public skepticism, something he doesn’t want voters to remember when they cast their ballots in the fall. Still, emphasizing how bad life has been under Trump during the pandemic may only serve to remind voters how much they despised Biden’s COVID-19 sequel.

Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images