How COVID-19 Changed Everything About the 2020 Election

by Molly Ball, TIME Magazine, August 6th 2020

“If the pandemic has revealed the fault lines in American society, it has exposed something else too: some things are still too important to get caught up in politics. Trump’s attempts to make public health a partisan matter have mostly failed. Large majorities of Americans support their states’ pandemic restrictions, believe it’s more important to rein in the virus than to get the economy up and running, think more needs to be done and–by resounding margins–support mask wearing.

The national mood has undergone a wholesale shift in this most tumultuous of election years. In Third Way’s studies, voters talked about feelings of sadness, anger, anxiety and fear. Pollsters’ response rates have skyrocketed because so many lonely, homebound people are answering the phone just to have someone to talk to. America is a divided nation, but also one that craves communion and solidarity. When a Black man was brutally murdered on video by police in Minneapolis, people took to the streets in unprecedented numbers. Three-quarters of Americans said they backed the recent racial-justice protests, and support for the Black Lives Matter movement surged, stunning political observers. It’s hard to imagine this happening without Trump. But it’s hard to imagine it without COVID-19 too.

When one day Americans look back on this plague, the campaign it coincided with will be an inextricable part of the story. The U.S. has held elections under difficult circumstances before: wars, depressions, natural disasters. Each time, in the face of difficulty, we voted on schedule; each time, democracy gave us the opportunity to choose how we would steer out of the crisis.”

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