The COVID-AM blog is a partnership between the UMI 3157 iGLOBES and the Institut des Amériques, coordinated by François-Michel Le Tourneau, Deputy Director and Marion Magnan, researcher at the Institute. About the blog.

by Michael Stricof, Professor in American Studies at LERMA, Aix-Marseille Université, and former coordinator of the Institut des Amériques' Washington DC office.

In January 2020, President Donald Trump was preparing to ride a booming economy to a triumphant victory...

Trump’s rising popularity represented what the political scientist John Mueller has defined as the “rally ’round the flag effect” in which a crisis temporarily gives a boost to a leader’s approval because the country turns to them for guidance. While these often evaporate quickly, a competent politician could have translated the crisis into a longer-lasting increase in support, even with only limited success in actually tackling the crisis.

One example worth considering is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who also had a net-negative approval rating before the Covid crisis. Cuomo saw his support skyrocket in April when New York was the epicenter of the virus, with one poll giving him an impressive 77 percent approval rating. His rally ‘round the flag effect wore off much more slowly than Trump’s. In July he was still polling at 60 percent approval despite (or perhaps because of) the strict measures imposed in New York state. Cuomo is of course tracked less than the president, so this data is merely indicative. Nevertheless, it shows how an experienced politician can maintain their popularity during a crisis by responding proactively and appearing to focus on the challenges facing the public. Alternatively, Trump seems to have been more jealous of Fauci’s popularity than concerned with ending the pandemic. Starting on April 19, the president took over the briefings before scrapping them entirely by the end of the month after his embarrassing comments about injecting bleach led to widespread criticism.

The president’s overall response to the virus can be described as ostrich-like. He chose to put his head in the sand and pretend that the virus would go away eventually. Even during the briefings, Trump preferred to play cheerleader for the economy while Fauci warned about hand washing and social distancing. Still, this relatively serious approach was discarded in favor of blind optimism that things would get better and an apparent muzzling of experts. Once the briefings were canceled, Trump’s popularity started falling, reaching near-record lows in June (56 percent disapproval for 40 percent approval, according to FiveThirtyEight). His ratings then regained their balance when the economy began to improve at the end of the summer, but the president never broke past his fairly static pre-Covid average. Going into the election, he did not profit from the increase in popularity available to a leader during a crisis.

What to make of this strategy? Ostriching has clearly failed. The president gained ground when he responded the most seriously; had he attempted even more directly to resolve the crisis, he could have taken full advantage of the rally ’round the flag effect. Even rising numbers of deaths might have served as a dramatic backdrop for a tough leader putting the interests of his country first, an easy victory for an incumbent. Perhaps more importantly, Trump left Biden a great opportunity to demonstrate alternative leadership. Incumbent presidents normally have a significant advantage in the United States and rarely lose reelection, especially when they can claim responsibility for a growing economy like Trump before the pandemic. 

In this context, the Biden team logically made Covid-19 the centerpiece of their campaign. While the candidate spoke about a number of subjects, every event he held was a means of signaling the difference between how a potential president Biden would handle the virus and how current president Trump was doing. Biden’s campaign relied heavily on virtual events during the summer with the candidate appearing from his basement studio. When he began campaigning in public, Biden’s events were defined by white circles indicating safe social distancing. This contrasted with Trump’s continued flouting of coronavirus guidelines at his megarallies.

Perhaps no image has been more symbolically significant than the mask. Biden and his staff wore them systematically. The president returned from Walter Reed Medical Center after his own bout with Covid-19 and the first image he wanted to share was him triumphantly removing his mask.