The showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris appears to be neck and neck. As pollsters and pundits scramble for explanations, Barack Obama thinks he knows why: the pandemic.
“It’s going to be tight because a lot of Americans are still struggling,” the former president said on the trail in Wisconsin last week. “As a country, we’ve been through a lot over the last few years. We forget sometimes. A historic pandemic wreaked havoc on communities, on families, on businesses.”
“Disruptions from the pandemic caused price hikes,” he continued. “It put a strain on family budgets, and people started feeling like no matter how hard they worked, they’re just treading water.”
To anyone who lived through the quarantines, the school closures, the boarded-up businesses, the scramble for vaccines and the front-page death tolls, Obama’s sentiment at least sounds accurate. Trump declared a national emergency for COVID-19 not even five years ago. U.S. history textbooks have already folded the pandemic into their account of the “New Millennium.”
While voters generally don’t feel the pandemic’s effects as acutely in 2024 as they did in 2020, experts insisted to NOTUS that the country hasn’t really moved on.
And yet — save for a few stray acknowledgments of the country’s collective misery in 2020 — the pandemic is largely missing from the campaign trail in 2024. Public health officials, pundits and politicians told NOTUS that’s with good reason.
“There’s just this global avoidance,” said Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association.
“Nobody wants to deal with it. It was such a catastrophic event,” he said. “There’s kind of a post-traumatic stress to it that people just want to avoid it. They don’t want to think about it.”
It’s not that the pandemic didn’t produce plenty of political fodder for the Harris and Trump campaigns to deploy in the final stretches of their campaigns. Democrats point out that Trump’s backing of Operation Warp Speed — which successfully delivered safe vaccines in under a year — is a signature accomplishment of his administration that he has underutilized. Harris can ask, with a straight face, whether voters really felt better off four years ago as the Trump years sputtered out compared to today.
But even if the pandemic isn’t getting much spotlight on the trail, even if it isn’t the deciding issue for voters, lawmakers and organizers who spoke to NOTUS said the pandemic still weighs heavily on the national political mood.
“It is quite remarkable,” Rep. Ami Bera — a doctor and member of the COVID-19 Select Committee — told NOTUS. “It wasn’t that long ago that you’re all locked down living through the worst pandemic of our lifetime, with millions dying around the world, and how quickly folks have moved on.”
“I don’t think it is a direct campaign issue,” he added later. “You do wonder if some of that underlies some of the general angst in the public.”
Bera is right that, for many voters, the pandemic isn’t even over. A March Gallup survey found that more than four in 10 Americans do not expect their lives to return to “pre-pandemic normalcy.” Although a Harvard study in June found that 70% of Americans think that, in retrospect, mask mandates were a good idea, KFF identified persistent political polarization, distrust in public health officials and vaccine hesitancy as a result of the pandemic.
“It seems like the campaigns have made a decision, this is not something they’re going to put front and center,” KFF expert Jen Kates told NOTUS. “That said, I do think that COVID has contributed to a very changed environment whether or not they’re talking about it.”
“Rising anti-science has spilled over into the political atmosphere,” she said.
Case in point: 2020’s Time magazine Person of the Year — Dr. Anthony Fauci — isn’t commenting on the election in 2024 for fear of backlash.
“Dr. Fauci prefers to avoid politically sensitive topics, as he is already a target,” said a Fauci spokesperson when NOTUS reached out for an interview. “Unfortunately, this is the reality we must navigate so we politely decline.”
Fauci might be onto something. According to GOP strategist and former Trump appointee Matthew Bartlett, it’s simply not good politics to bring up COVID.
“The smart messaging on COVID is not to mention it at all,” he told NOTUS. “No one wants to talk about it. It is in the rearview mirror.”
That’s not to say the pandemic isn’t having an effect. “It was like a massive car crash,” Bartlett acknowledged. “But there’s still some damage.”
Some campaign surrogates, like Obama, have nodded toward that damage. Rep. Robert Garcia lost his mother and stepfather to complications from COVID-19 and has hit Trump for failing to provide competent leadership during a national crisis. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been fully integrated into the Trump campaign, where he continues to spew vaccine conspiracies. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told Penn State University students this weekend that Trump would not have shut down schools — even though schools were closed during his presidency.
Still, the scattershot messaging seems to be getting through to some voters.
Attendees at recent Harris and Trump rallies in Atlanta told The New York Times that the pandemic still weighs on them. At the Penn State rally, a student told NOTUS he got involved in politics after his high school closed during COVID-19.
“A lot of the youth organizers that were active in 2020, we kind of cut our teeth with the pandemic,” Voters of Tomorrow Executive Director Santiago Mayer told NOTUS. “Really, this year has been learning how to organize young people without a pandemic.”
The research around whether the pandemic’s lingering impacts will actually animate voters, however, is unclear.
“The impact of COVID is more about the electoral practices that we put in place in 2020,” said Elizabeth C. Matto, director of the Center for Youth Political Participation at Rutgers University, who noted that access to early voting and mail-in ballots was greater during the pandemic.
Although the full electoral impact of COVID-19 won’t be felt until Nov. 5, people concerned about pandemic preparedness and public health who spoke to NOTUS said they are bracing for the next administration.
While the political implications of COVID-19 are murky, they say the policy implications are striking.
At the APHA, Benjamin said he’s considering cabinet recommendations, noting that RFK “is not qualified for a health job.” On Capitol Hill, Bera said public health-minded lawmakers are already preparing to engage with Trump by appealing to his ego and COVID-era accomplishments.
“We would highlight that and say, ‘Great job, President Trump,’” he said. “Let’s see if we can’t do more and get that done by 100 days.”
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Riley Rogerson is a reporter at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz, who is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.