The COVID-19 Pandemic and the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. New article by GLO Fellow Abel Brodeur and Leonardo Baccini & Stephen Weymouth now published ONLINE FIRST with FREE ACCESS in the Journal of Population Economics.

A new article published in the Journal of Population Economics suggests that Donald Trump would likely have won re-election if COVID-19 cases in the United States had been 5 percent lower.

COVID-19 brought the change
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Abel Brodeur

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
by Baccini, Leonardo & Brodeur, Abel & Weymouth, Stephen
Pre-publication revised GLO DP 710 [pre.].

Published ONLINE FIRST 2021: Journal of Population Economics, Vol. 34, Issue 2/2021. FREE ACCESS to the published version including the PDF.

GLO Fellow Abel Brodeur

Author Abstract: What is the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 US presidential election? Guided by a pre-analysis plan, we estimate the effect of COVID-19 cases and deaths on the change in county-level voting for Donald Trump between 2016 and 2020. To account for potential confounders, we include a large number of COVID-19-related controls as well as demographic and socioeconomic variables. Moreover, we instrument the numbers of cases and deaths with the share of workers employed in meat-processing factories to sharpen our identification strategy. We find that COVID-19 cases negatively affected Trump’s vote share. The estimated effect appears strongest in urban counties, in states without stay-at-home orders, in swing states, and in states that Trump won in 2016. A simple counterfactual analysis suggests that Trump would likely have won re-election if COVID-19 cases had been 5 percent lower. We also find some evidence that COVID-19 incidence had a positive effect on voters’ mobilization, helping Biden win the presidency.

More from the GLO Coronavirus Cluster

GLO Discussion Papers are research and policy papers of the GLO Network which are widely circulated to encourage discussion. Provided in cooperation with EconStor, a service of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, GLO Discussion Papers are among others listed in RePEc (see IDEAS,  EconPapers)Complete list of all GLO DPs – downloadable for free.

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