The role of the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections

Can a pandemic affect the way people vote?

Professors Maurizio Porfiri, Manuel Ruiz Marín‬, and Pietro De Lellis applied a spatial, information-theoretic approach to analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic influenced the voting behavior in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections.

Their findings did not corroborate the popular narrative that President Donald Trump lost the 2020 elections because of the way he handled the COVID-19 pandemic. On the contrary, in areas that experienced less COVID-19 cases, Trump lost more ground to his opponent, now President Joseph Biden.

Read more in the paper “Quantifying the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections” published in The European Physical Journal Special Topics (special issue on Complex Urban Systems) here.
NYU Tandon’s press release here.
 

Image credit: NYU Tandon/Shutterstock.