Coronavirus Deaths Might Doom Trump’s Reelection
States with higher coronavirus death rates may see declining voter support for President Donald Trump and other Republican candidates, possibly by margins large enough to swing tight election races, a new study has found.
Less than a week away from an election that many view as a referendum on the White House’s handling of the pandemic, coronavirus cases are now rising in nearly every US state, hospitalizations are spiking, and there are worrying signs that deaths are increasing again.
The new study, which polled hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country, found that when a state’s COVID-19 death rate doubled within a month’s time, Trump’s approval rating dropped by 0.5%, independent of all other factors. The decline in support, reported in the journal Science Advances on Friday, mirrored the effects that casualties of the Korean War, Vietnam War, and Iraq War had on past presidents’ approval ratings with voters.
Led by political scientist Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University, the researchers also asked whether people changed which candidates they were planning to vote for. Across states, every monthly doubling of coronavirus death rates caused a 0.37% drop in the number of people who said they planned to vote for Trump, the study found. The drop in support for Republican senators was even steeper, at 0.79%.