US election 2020: COVID-19 deaths eroding Americans' support for Republicans at all federal levels

Widespread COVID-19 deaths in the United States have resulted in “substantial damage” for US President Donald Trump and other Republican candidates ahead of the US presidential elections 2020, a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Science has found.

The paper, titled "Fatalities from COVID-19 are reducing Americans' support for Republicans at every level of federal office" written by Christopher Warshaw, Lynn Vavreck and Ryan Baxter-King found that “States and local areas with higher levels of COVID-19 fatalities are less likely to support President Trump and Republican candidates for House and Senate”.

The researchers surveyed more than 300,000 people between the summers of 2019 and 2020, and used several granular data sources and leveraged both temporal and geographic variation in the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic using local-level data on fatalities gathered by the New York Times.

The study aims to determine the “political consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic”, which has thus far claimed over 200,000 American lives.

To drive the point home, the paper says the disease has killed “5 times as many Americans as were killed in the Korean War, over 3 times as many as in Vietnam, and 40 times as many Americans as were killed in the entire Iraq War”.

The authors recommend President Trump and his Republican allies “would benefit electorally from a reduction in COVID-19 fatalities” and “a greater emphasis on social distancing, masks, and other mitigation strategies”.

“Just as the public penalises the president for casualties during wars, the public is penalising the president and other members of his party for local fatalities during the pandemic,” the authors say, warning that “COVID-19 could cost Trump and other Republicans several percentage points in the 2020 election”.

This could swing the presidential election and the US Senate toward Democrats, with particularly high effects in swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Florida.

All of these states had tight margins in the 2016 presidential election. Michigan’s margin was particularly narrow (0.2%), as was New Hampshire’s (0.4%), suggesting that COVID-related fatalities may be consequential not only at the individual level in 2020 but also in terms of Electoral College results.

Similarly, there were very close US Senate elections in 2018. In Florida, 0.2% of the vote separated the Republican winner from the Democrat.