WASHINGTON — The coronavirus pandemic was supposed to be the issue that doomed the Republican Party in the 2020 election, with President Donald Trump's poorly received response to the crisis leading to decisive and widespread losses up and down the ballot.
Now that the dust has mostly settled — with Trump defeated but Democrats holding fewer seats in the House and the Senate than expected — the president's opponents realize it wasn't that simple.
Democrats and Republicans alike are reconsidering what they thought they knew about the public's view of the viral outbreak and Trump's handling of it, convinced the issue wasn't as helpful politically for Democrats as they once expected.
Some strategists go so far as to say they think the president's insistent push to lift economic restrictions, compared with Joe Biden's emphasis on health and safety, even helped his cause with voters, leading to narrower-than-expected losses in battleground states and helping Republicans enjoy surprise success in congressional races.
"It's possible that the pandemic actually didn't accrue to Biden's benefit at all," said Tim Miller, the political director for the super PAC Republican Voters Against Trump. "And in certain areas, the open-it-up debate might have cost him votes."
Miller's view is a minority, even among anti-Trump operatives who think the pandemic wasn't as electorally beneficial as they expected. Many of them argue that although fewer voters were ultimately moved by the crisis, those who did were still crucial to Biden's margin of victory in closely fought states like Wisconsin and Arizona.
And few disagree that the pandemic, which since the spring has reshaped many facets of American life, was ever-present on voters' minds, or that large majorities viewed Trump's response to it negatively.
But even if voters felt that way, it didn't necessarily mean they were compelled to vote for Biden or Democratic congressional candidates — at least not to the degree many expected.
"Clearly, we just missed something here in the data," said Jason Bresler, a Democratic strategist. "It just doesn't add up."
Bresler, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's national political director during the 2018 midterms, said he saw red flags about the effectiveness of the party's coronavirus message ahead of the 2020 election. He said his research showed that voters were more persuaded by ads that stuck strictly to a health care message (like guaranteeing protections for pre-existing conditions) instead of ads that wove together both the pandemic and health care, a worrying sign for what Democrats considered their top issue.
Other Democratic strategists said their data showed that voters grew so tired of the pandemic by the end of the campaign that they grew hesitant to even mention it in their ads, fearful that anything more than a fleeting image of people wearing masks would provoke a backlash.
"People were exhausted by it," said Ian Russell, a Democratic strategist. "They wanted to move on."
It wasn't as if voters didn't receive serial reminders of Trump's handling of the pandemic. In September, a book from Bob Woodward revealed the president deliberately downplayed the danger of the coronavirus. Questions about the coronavirus were included near the start of every debate. And Trump's own hospitalization in early October, the consequence of an apparent super-spreader event at the White House, received wall-to-wall coverage.
But Miller said that in his super PAC's focus groups of moderate GOP voters, many participants were unfailingly willing to cut the president slack, even if they thought his response had been poor.
"I remember seeing back in the spring and the summer these focus groups, where I wanted them to be madder about it than they were," Miller said. "They just weren't. They thought it was an outside, unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime event that nobody could have done well with, that he shouldn't be held to account for it."
He added that for many of these voters, perceptions of a strong economy before the pandemic hit still weighed heavily in Trump's favor.
Some Democrats privately suggest that the relative valley in cases between the early summer and fall helped ease concerns about COVID-19 for many voters, and that the recent surge of cases didn't come in time to change those perceptions.
GOP operatives also suggested that the coronavirus-related decision from Democrats to largely abandon their door-to-door canvassing program helped reduce turnout among Black voters, a community disproportionately affected by the pandemic, relative to other voter blocs.
"The real question to me is, was it the Biden campaign's failure to motivate the Black vote, or was the fear of the virus that kept the Black vote home?" said Paul Shumaker, a North-Carolina based Republican strategist.
Shumaker pointed to the results of the closer-than-expected governor's race in his state, where Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper fended off an underfunded GOP challenger, as proof of the damage the relative decline in Black turnout caused down the ballot in some cases.
And there's a broad consensus that if election polls failed to anticipate a surge in turnout among Trump-friendly voters in rural areas, pandemic-related surveys are likely underestimating support for the president's position on lifting economic restrictions or even his response to the crisis generally.
Danny Barefoot, a Democratic strategist, said in a post-election focus group he conducted of persuadable voters who ultimately voted for the president, many of them expressed a deep concern about re-entering lockdown.
"I can't do that again, no matter how bad it gets," Barefoot recalled one participant saying. "And everybody in the group was nodding their heads."
Barefoot's focus group, made up of 20 mostly white working-class women from battleground states, included voters who still didn't think highly of Trump's response to the pandemic, but doubted that a new president would materially change the situation next year.
"Eighty% of people said that the pandemic was going to be over in the next year sometime, we'd be back to normal next year," the strategist said. "And regardless of who we elect, it wasn't going to make that much of a difference."
Biden and the Democrats spent much of the campaign castigating Trump's reaction to the surge of COVID-19 cases, blaming him for failing to wear a mask or effectively marshal the federal government to help states and local communities deal with the virus.
Their own affirmative case for what they'd do differently, however, included mask mandates, listening to scientists, ramping up production of protective equipment and implementing a national testing strategy.
"We'll have a national mandate to wear a mask," Biden said during an August speech. "Not as a burden but as a patriotic duty to protect one another,"
That message would poll well, but wasn't tangible enough for many voters, some Democratic strategists quietly conceded.
One GOP operative compared it to the Democrats' message on climate change, which emphasized the need to listen to scientists, but lacked a more forceful articulation of why it matters to the average person's everyday life.
Another Republican strategist, Josh Holmes, said he thought Democrats "overvalued an upper-middle-class view" of the pandemic.
"It wasn't that you had people who were pandemic deniers just fundamentally not believing the pandemic was a problem," said Holmes, an adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "It's that you have tens of millions of people making a living in the service industry that have watched everything evaporate around them. And that has a whole bunch of economic connotations, and basically what Democrats were selling doesn't comport with them being able to make a living anytime soon."
Bresler, the Democratic strategist, expressed his frustration that his party often focused on making a negative case against the GOP while failing to highlight their own agenda. It was a plan, he said, that would fall short with voters who didn't think Trump's response was so poor.
"I don't think that swing voters saw it so black and white that (Republicans) dropped the ball," he said.
Some Democrats, even while acknowledging the issue might not have been as potent as they had hoped, say it was still the single biggest reason Trump lost.
"The voters who we saw swing toward us had consistently said that their number one issue was dealing with the coronavirus," said Patrick McHugh, the executive director for the pro-Biden super PAC Priorities USA. "And their number one concern about Donald Trump was his failure to do so."
Priorities USA consistently targeted Trump with pandemic-related ads, all the way through the end of the race when Biden's own campaign was highlighting ads that emphasized national unity and patriotism.
Holmes, the GOP operative, said in his view, even if the issue didn't move as many voters as widely thought, Trump would have won the election "by acclamation" absent the pandemic.
"It definitely played a role," Holmes said. "It was by far and away the most significant impactful environmental piece of this election. The question is which way does it break amongst which parts of the electorate."
