Has covid-19 cost Trump the election?

At the end of January, a little after the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the United States, the New York Stock Exchange hit an all-time high, and Donald Trump's biggest concern was the impact of Boeing's woes on the economy. 

"The American Dream is back, bigger, better and stronger than ever before," the US president declared in Davos, already in campaign mode.

In February as the Iowa caucuses were getting under way, to kick off the election year, political observers were musing about Trump's strengths going into the 2020 campaign. He would ride the power of incumbency and a booming economy to November, some argued, potentially against a Democrat whose views were out of the mainstream.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Fast-forward nine months. More than nine million confirmed infected with the coronavirus and more than 230,000 have died from Covid-19.

Despite an impressive rebound in the third quarter, millions of Americans lost their jobs, shattering the most reliable electoral argument of American presidents in search of a second term -- that of economic strength.

Trump's defeat at the polls Tuesday is far from assured. But his handling of the pandemic has certainly cost him votes.

At rallies and on Twitter, Trump has accused the "fake news lamestream media" of focusing on "Covid, Covid, Covid" to hurt his reelection chances.

Surveys for several months now have shown that Americans are judging their leader poorly when it comes to the virus. Only 40 percent approve, according to a recent Gallup poll, compared to 60 percent in March.

These types of polls are too general to detect if there will be a so-called "Covid effect" on the election.

But on Friday, researchers behind a new analysis in the journal Science Advances said they found just that.

They drew on more 300,000 survey responses from the summers of 2019 and 2020, then tied that to local Covid-19 death rates, concluding the pandemic may have significantly damaged public support for Trump.

Specifically, people in counties which saw a doubling in the death rate in the month prior to the day they were surveyed were on average 0.14 percent less likely to vote Trump, and 0.28 percent less likely to vote for Republican congressional candidates.

That might not sound like a whole lot. But George Washington University's Christopher Warshaw told AFP it could still be significant. "A lot of elections are determined by small margins. So even relatively small effects are sufficiently important," he said.

It still might be enough for Biden. In 2000, just a few hundred votes separated the winner and loser in the key state of Florida. And four years ago, a meager 77,000 vote lead in three states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin) tipped the election in favor of Trump.