2020 election if held on different dates

[Alben Barkley]

How would the 2020 election have turned out differently (if at all) if if was held on any of the following dates instead of when it was actually held?

1. January 1, 2020. Before COVID hit the US or was major news at all.

2. April 1, 2020. COVID has hit big in the US. States have shut down, national emergency declared, stock market crashed, etc.

3. July 4, 2020. Biden was hitting some polling highs around this point; Trump's handling of COVID was widely perceived as disastrous by now.

4. October 4, 2020. Trump has been diagnosed with COVID and taken to the hospital in the final days of the campaign.

5. November 10, 2020. One week after the actual election and a day after Pfizer announced the vaccine Trump wanted to take credit for.

6. January 5, 2021. Same day as the Georgia run-offs. Let's say the Supreme Court orders a re-do of the election as a result of Trump's lawsuits, and he has been behaving just as desperately and unhinged in the previous months as he did in real life.

7. January 7, 2021. Same as above, except the re-do instead happens the day after the Capitol attacks as an emergency result of a Constitutional crisis because Pence, bowing to the mob, refused to certify the electors.

The last two scenarios are not realistic, I know. Just think about how much you think Trump's pre-1/6 antics may have affected his own electoral fortunes if he had to run in addition to the GA senators for the 1/5 scenario, and how much 1/6 itself would have affected him in the 1/7 scenario.

[Alben Barkley]

There's another date of some interest I forgot to add: February 6, 2020. The day after Trump was impeached the first time, but before he had been acquitted by the Senate. I didn't mention this in the original post because I literally forgot about the first impeachment and when it occurred. That is how insane everything that's happened since has been, that the impeachment of a president (which took place less than a year before it happened again) seems like a minor footnote.

I guess you can also add January 14, 2021 (day after second impeachment) but I doubt that would be much different from January 7.

[Alben Barkley]

Here's a timeline of when I believe each candidate was probably favored during Trump's presidency based on the results.

January-May 2017. Trump would've won.

June 2017-April 2019: Biden would've won. (Maybe Trump would've won at a few points in mid-2018)

May 2019-April 2020: Trump would've won.

May 2020-present: Biden would've won with perhaps a few days in mid-late August where Trump would've won.

Why do you think odds would have flipped in Trump's favor in Spring 2019 until after COVID hit the next year? His approval ratings never really moved much. Also why is mid-late August 2020 the exception for Trump? His polling was abysmal throughout most of the summer. Is it just the convention? Because there wasn't really any bounce.

Personally I think Trump could have won pre-COVID (and maybe even after if he did things very differently), but by no means was it ever guaranteed or even was he necessarily favored. He was a VERY polarizing figure, with people very strongly divided into two camps about him, but always more against than for. The approval ratings were very consistent about that, with virtually nothing ever moving them significantly in one direction or the other. Because of this, I'm not honestly certain that at any point the outcome ever could have been drastically different. I think a state or two could have flipped one way or the other but that's about it. The polarization is just too strong right now.

Hell, in my view he deserved to lose in an epic landslide more than any other incumbent ever, Hoover included, but I'm not sure such a thing is possible under any circumstances at the moment. If you're even right about just FL/NC/TX at most flipping even after 1/6, which I suspect you are, that's a pretty telling sign of just how deeply entrenched we are as a nation into two diamatretically opposed realities right now.

[Alben Barkley]

You do raise some fair points. Personally, I do think given that in a pandemic the incumbent still almost won, I do believe if the president had done a few things differently, he would've done a lot better. I agree there was never a time he would've won in a blowout but I do think there would've been at least a few days during Trump's presidency where he would've pulled out a win had the election been held on that day. Maybe I should've said Summer or Fall 2019 instead.

Yeah. To be clear I’m not saying he never could have won, and indeed there probably were times when it was more likely than not, and at pretty much all times he at least had a chance. It’s just that I think it was pretty much always destined to be a close one within a very narrow range of outcomes, more narrow than many of us thought. Like I think real 2020+TX, NC, FL probably was indeed Biden’s ceiling, while his floor probably would have just been Hillary’s map, maybe minus NV.