“The question is who is the public going to believe.”
The 2020 US presidential election, like many of this year’s most important decisions, will be decided by COVID-19. Just as the coronavirus has spread across America, it has seeped itself into the political campaigns of US President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden. On the one hand, the Democrats argue that Trump has failed in his handling of the crisis. As of Tuesday, some 226,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 and 8.78 million have been infected. On the other hand, the president says that he did very well, all things considered, and if Biden would have been in charge, the death rate would have been two million or more. The Democrats say that Trump and his staff contracted coronavirus because of their failure to comply with health officials’ recommendations, such as wearing masks and social distancing. The president will argue he caught coronavirus and survived, that he won his personal battle against the pandemic. “The question is who is the public going to believe,” said Prof. Eytan Gilboa, a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. “The Democrats want the election to be about coronavirus. Trump is trying to deflect from the subject.” Despite the fact that cases are in fact highest now in districts the president generally leads and needs, it is not clear that COVID will plague the president in the final days of his campaign as much as some might think. The White House appears unable to stop the spread of the virus, as numbers spike at once-again unprecedented rates. And this is especially the case for Biden’s constituencies; minority groups, including Latinos and African Americans have been harder hit by the pandemic than other groups. A paper published on the website of USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences showed that hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 among members of the African American community are nearly three times the share of African Americans in the population.
