US elections 2020, Covid-19 and the Internet - Donald Trump's decline

Abstract

The 2020 US presidential election was one of the most polarized and controversial in history marked by the Covid-19 crisis and protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. The United States in 2020 was the country with the most contamination and deaths from the new Coronavirus which led to Trump's position in facing the pandemic to be questioned. Trump on the other hand adopted a denialist discourse ignoring sanitary measures like wearing masks and also seeking to diminish the importance of the virus. As a result, this work seeks to gauge whether public attention in relation to Covid-19 may have affected Trump's votes. The hypothesis is that possibly Americans' interest in Covid-19 may have led to a poor assessment of Trump, thus hampering electoral performance. The results show adherence to the hypothesis where 8.2% of the votes lost by Trump can be explained by the Internet users' interest in the Covid-19 theme.