The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Context of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Campaign

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic that has affected the world in 2020 and 2021 has had, is having and will have an impact on most areas of human life. This is a direct impact – such as health or economic consequences, as well as indirect – reevaluation of social relations, systems of values and culture norms. Since the fight against pandemic is in most regularly functioning countries a matter of public policy, this pandemic has a very serious impact also on the sphere of politics in general. This article aims to analyze what impact this pandemic had on the political situation in the United States in 2020. The year 2020 was a presidential election year in the United States, an election for which a significant part of the international community was waiting for mostly because of the clarity and diversity of the candidates. The aim of this paper is to answer the question to what extent the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the course of the campaign and especially the rhetoric and behavior of the candidates. It will also consider the impact going in the other direction, i.e. how and if at all, the fact that in 2020 we were dealing with the election period influenced the actions taken by the authorities at different levels in the fight against the pandemic. One of the main conclusions of the analysis is that the pandemic, given both the context of this particular election, the specific polarization of American society, and the opinions of individual electorates on important values, put Donald Trump in a particularly uncomfortable position and knocked out of his hands many of the advantages that had contributed to his victory four years earlier. The specific constellation of analyzed factors meant that, in the opinion of the author of the article, Donald Trump could not emerge victorious from this situation unlike many other leaders of countries whose ratings and evaluation in the reality of the fight against the pandemic were growing and improving.