The long, strange political shadow of 2020

It was a peak moment for the left — and it happened on Trump’s watch.

You are probably better off than you were four years ago.

Not unless you like pandemics, mass death, mass unemployment, and the shutdown of much in-person work, educational and social activity. It was also a tumultuous political time: an election year, with record-breaking protests following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, but also a wave of violence and property damage in many cities. 

So it might seem strange that Donald Trump is reprising Ronald Reagan by literally asking voters whether they are better off than they were four years ago. Four years ago was 2020, one of the most miserable years in modern American history.

But while Democrats like to treat this as a sort of “gotcha”, I’m not so sure it’s a bad strategy. One theory, as Paul Krugman writes, is that Trump hopes voters will remember the “before times” — that is, before the pandemic. This is not a crazy piece of psychology. Just speaking personally, the timeline of the pandemic years seems scrambled. Was I really eating at restaurants outdoors in 40 degree weather? Was that really only four years ago? Memories from late 2019, like a vacation I took with friends that was intended as a last moment of fun before the election crunch, somehow seem more recent.

I have an alternative theory, however: Trump is happy enough to let voters think about 2020 because he thinks they’ll blame Biden and Democrats for the things they didn’t like about it. That’s completely unfair to Biden, of course, who wasn’t president yet. But politics isn’t always so literal. Even with Trump in charge, 2020 was probably the most left-wing moment in the US in my lifetime.¹ Since then, the share of voters who say Democrats are too liberal has risen by 7 points. And Trump is counting on a continued backlash against the left. 

Consider what were perhaps the three most important political questions at the time: first, the fiscal response to the pandemic; second, the public health response; and third, the protests and accompanying “racial reckoning”. For the most part, it was the left’s preferences that prevailed on these.

Fiscally, 2020 featured the highest level of federal spending as a share of GDP since World War II, a combination of emergency relief and economic stimulus. The CARES Act approved under Trump in March 2020 was relatively uncontroversial despite spending $2.2 trillion — it passed 419-6 in the House and 96-0 in the Senate. Biden’s American Rescue plan in 2021 passed on strictly partisan lines, although that bill was also popular at the time. 

However, voters obviously do care about inflation. And four years later, the narrative that “Democrats spent too much money, therefore inflation is Biden’s fault” resonates with voters in polls, even if it’s a simplification of the facts. (Trump spent a lot of money also, and a Federal Reserve study last year concluded that while stimulus spending was partly responsible for the high rates of inflation from 2021 through 2023, there were other factors too.)

I put the fiscal response first, because what remains is racial politics and the public health response to COVID, two topics that are sure to light up the comments section. In fact, for this post, I’m going to preemptively limit comments to paying subscribers (Sorry.) Let’s take COVID first.

Here’s a hot take: I think we should view the COVID response in blue states as having been quite radical. Not the first several weeks, when nobody knew what was happening and even many red states were relatively shut down. But closing in-person schooling for more than a year, and banning people from attending church or even from going to the beach — all that shows the government intervening in everyday life in a way it never had in most Americans’ experience.²

Is it fair to attribute zealous COVID policy to the left? Actually, the material effects of COVID restrictions were detrimental to a number of interests that the left is supposed to care about: the laptop class worked from home and ordered delivery food from “essential workers”; poorer students were predictably more screwed over by school closures; civic institutions and urban life were hollowed out. But politics these days are more about self-expression than self-interest. Public health professionals are overwhelmingly Democrats. (In 2018, people who listed “public health” as their profession contributed to Democratic over Republican campaign committees at a 10:1 ratio.) To be for COVID restrictions was to oppose Trump, who repeatedly and clumsily downplayed the pandemic.

It’s not clear how interested voters are in litigating COVID policy today. (Ron DeSantis’s campaign, among other problems, was premised on the idea that it COVID was more salient than it was.) At the same time, the pandemic was a traumatic experience to a greater or lesser degree for nearly every American. So I wonder if there aren’t some latent and lingering effects; it would be surprising in some sense if there weren’t. With the benefit of hindsight — and the fading memories of the peak death tolls — COVID-era restrictions are now viewed as having gone too far. By 2022, for instance, a plurality or majority of voters had concluded there was too little attention given to quality of life, individual choice and educational needs during the pandemic response.

Biden hasn’t treated the pandemic as entirely off-limits; his campaign cut a pretty good ad about the early days of COVID after Trump’s “better off” post. Still, one way to read Biden’s struggles in the polls is as a failure to provide a promised return to post-pandemic normalcy. The sharp drop in Biden’s approval rating that began in summer 2021 is sometimes attributed to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the timing lines up at least as well with the Delta variant and a new series of arguments about COVID restrictions. 

Biden doesn’t want to talk about the George Floyd protests – or the Gaza protests

The 2020 Democratic platform — after opening with a “land acknowledgement” to a series of Wisconsin-area Indian tribes — included this sentence in its preamble: “[Americans believe that] protest is among the highest forms of patriotism.” Now, nobody reads party platforms, which typically reflect a hodgepodge of demands from different constituencies in the party. Still, you don’t see much rhetoric like this now. Biden didn’t mention Floyd’s name in either his 2024 campaign kickoff speech or his State of the Union, and only mentioned “policing” in the context of injuries sustained by the police on January 6 and urging investment into more community police officers. And when Biden has spoken about the ongoing campus protests, he’s had some harsh words for the protestors:

Dissent is essential to democracy.  But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education.

Look, it’s basically a matter of fairness.  It’s a matter of what’s right.  There’s the right to protest but not the right to cause chaos.

People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.

But let’s be clear about this as well.  There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students.  There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.

It’s simply wrong.  There is no place for racism in America.  It’s all wrong.  It’s un-American. 

Biden is probably right on the politics of this; the Gaza protests are unpopular, though also something that most voters don’t care about much. The George Floyd protests were a different matter, however. They were possibly the largest protests in American history. Of course, people may have attended them for different reasons — most peacefully, some not, and others just as an excuse to get out of the house with a get-out-of-jail-free card from public health officials.

Still, public opinion shifted substantially in the wake of Floyd’s death. In Civiqs polling, support for Black Lives Matter shot up almost overnight from the low 40’s in early 2020 to a peak of 52 after Floyd’s death. While there are a couple of caveats here — 2020 polling was quite bad, perhaps because of some pandemic-related issues with who was answering surveys — this chart serves as a pretty good proxy for whether wokeness was more in vogue or out of vogue. It peaked in summer 2020, when books about race and racism dominated bestseller lists. Of course, if the median shifts, the leftmost tail shifts along with it, so this included things like calls to literally abolish the police. Predictably enough, there’s been a backlash, with support for BLM now standing at 39 percent, lower than it was before the protests.

The underlying dynamic here is that public opinion is often thermostatic — meaning that it moves in the opposite direction of whomever is in power. Abortion rights have never been more popular than they are now, for instance, following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But 2020 marked the last of four years of Trump’s unpopular presidency, and leftism was on the march. In their second primary debate of the cycle, every single Democrat including Biden raised their hand affirmatively in response to a question about whether their health care plan would cover undocumented/illegal immigrants, a deeply unpopular idea. And while in the end Democrats showed a practical streak by nominating Biden, Bernie Sanders looked for a moment like he’d win the nomination.

The pandemic was unusual, though, in that most of the decisions about restrictions were made by state and local governments — many of which were blue following Democrats’ strong showing in the 2018 midterms. The protests were also concentrated in blue states and cities. Trump was the president, but in some ways the period revealed the weakness of the presidency — both in Trump’s futility in combating COVID, and in how much of the resulting policy was more in line with what Democrats wanted than Republicans did. And that makes the “four years ago” question strange, one which Biden is fighting to a draw as much as he’s hoping to score points.

1. Born 1978.

2. Many of the most excessive examples involve California, which is why it’s a little rich when Gavin Newsom speaks of California as the “true freedom state”.