Covid cost Trump the presidency in 2020, and it may have cleared the path for his return.
The day after an election can bring an uncanny quiet.
After months — even years — of frenzied campaign activity, nonstop ads and raucous campaign rallies, comes a day when the nation looks into the mirror and into its future.
My colleagues on the Politics desk and across The Times worked through the night and on into the morning to bring you coverage of President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory, a return to power that has already plunged this country into a new era of uncertainty. In picking Trump, voters have elevated a once-banished political figure who has promised to govern as a strongman and upend the nation’s handling of the economy, public health and foreign affairs — and they probably helped to keep him out of prison.
There is a lot to process, no matter which outcome you wanted.
If there is one image that sticks in my mind as I sift through all of it — one image that is most important to understanding how and why Trump is returning to power — it’s not a picture of the president-elect. Rather, it’s this graphic, which shows how much better he did across much of the country last night, compared with his failed presidential bid in 2020.
Early Results Show a Red Shift Across the U.S.
Of the counties with nearly complete results, more than 90 percent shifted in favor of former President Donald J. Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
This is a country going through a big change.
It will be a long time before we can say exactly why a country that decisively rejected Trump four years ago welcomed him back last night — and the answer is going to be complicated. But it is possible, I think, that the same thing that cost Trump the presidency in 2020 played at lease some role in clearing a path for his return in 2024: the pandemic.
In 2020, Covid-19 upended American life, killing 385,000 people in a year and sending the American economy into a recession. Trump’s chaotic and dismissive handling of a public health crisis that had made life almost unrecognizable is part of why voters rejected him that year.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
