Why the Election Wasn’t a Biden Landslide
Despite a pandemic and an abysmal recession, five economic factors spared the incumbent from a more lopsided loss
Why didn’t the pandemic recession precipitate a landslide for Joe Biden?
That is a central mystery stemming from what, at the moment, looks like a narrow, if decisive, loss for President Donald Trump. Even though the unemployment rate is more than double what it was a year ago, even though 1 million Americans a week are applying for jobless aid, even though Congress has failed for six months to pass desperately needed additional stimulus, even though Trump has the worst job-creation record of any president going back to World War II, voters gave the incumbent decent marks on the economy up to Election Day, and he expanded his 2016 vote count by at least 5.7 million.
At least five factors seemed to be at work, turning what should have been a gale-force headwind against Trump into little more than a breeze, and allowing the president to continue running on the strength of an economy that the coronavirus destroyed.
The first is that the general election occurred when the economy was bouncing back, not when it was falling apart. Voters, as a general point, care a lot about the direction of the economy: They are…
