COVID-19 coverage linked to rise in anti-Asian sentiment, especially among Trump supporters

A new study published in American Politics Research has found that Americans’ favorable attitudes toward Asians declined during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers linked this decline to both the severity of the pandemic and the intensity of national news coverage about COVID-19—especially when the virus was associated with China. The study also found that the effect was stronger among people who supported then-President Donald Trump, suggesting that partisan cues and pandemic-related rhetoric influenced how Americans viewed Asians as a group.

The researchers set out to investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic affected how Americans evaluated Asians. This question arose from concerns that the pandemic, which originated in China, would lead to increased bias and scapegoating of Asians in the United States. The team noted that public figures, including President Trump, had repeatedly referred to the virus using terms like “China virus” and “Kung Flu,” rhetoric that could reinforce negative associations between the pandemic and people of Asian descent.

Drawing on social psychology theories of scapegoating and out-group threat, the researchers proposed that widespread criticism of China’s handling of the virus might spill over into more negative attitudes toward Asians broadly—regardless of individuals’ specific national origin or role in the pandemic.

“If memory serves, this project originated based on a conversation that I had with Dan Qi, a former doctoral student of mine at the time who is now on the faculty at Lamar University,” said corresponding author James C. Garand, the Emogene Pliner Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University.

“Dan and I wondered if the association of the origins of the COVID panic with China might have had a negative effect on how Americans thought of Chinese people or, even more broadly, Asians and/or Asian Americans. Dan was born in China and has interest in Asian-American politics and the politics of immigration, so it was natural that she and I would consider how the COVID pandemic and Americans’ evaluations of Asians would be linked.”

“It so happens that the first two releases of the Nationscape surveys occurred around the same time as our discussion,” Garand explained. “The Nationscape surveys—organized by Chris Tausanovich and Lynn Vavreck of UCLA—involved 77 weeks of large-sample surveys (with sample sizes of 6000+ per week) conducted from July 2019 to February 2021. These surveys asked many of the same questions each week, and so we had a dataset comprised of almost 500,000 survey respondents that permitted us to track over time Americans’ attitudes on a range of issues.”

“Of course, the COVID pandemic hit the United States hard in early 2020, which was in the middle of the time period covered by the Nationscape surveys. These surveys asked Americans about their evaluations of numerous political figures and groups, including how Americans evaluated Asians and other racial/ethnic groups.”

In particular, each respondent was asked to rate their favorability toward different racial and ethnic groups, including Asians, on a four-point scale ranging from very unfavorable to very favorable.

To capture how the pandemic might have influenced public attitudes, the researchers combined the survey data with two additional sources: weekly COVID-19 death statistics at the state level and a measure of weekly national news coverage about the pandemic. The latter was constructed using keyword searches in nine major news outlets, including CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, and National Public Radio. The result was a detailed record of how visible COVID-19 was in the media and how severe the pandemic was in each state at a given time.

The analysis showed a consistent pattern: as the number of new COVID-19 deaths in a respondent’s state increased, and as national news coverage of the virus intensified, Americans expressed lower levels of favorability toward Asians. While the size of these effects was moderate, the pattern was statistically significant and consistent with the researchers’ hypothesis that the pandemic triggered a scapegoating response.

In other words, even though Asian Americans and other Asians living in the United States were not responsible for the outbreak, negative associations with China appeared to spill over into public opinion about Asians more generally.

“Our key finding is that the COVID pandemic depressed Americans’ evaluations of Asians by a moderate amount,” Garand told PsyPost. “Using data from Nationscape, we find that mean evaluations of Asians declined steadily after the onset of the pandemic. In our statistical analyses we find that Asian evaluations declined systematically as a function of coverage of the pandemic in nine national media outlets as well as the number of new COVID deaths per 100K population in respondents home states, with news coverage having the strongest effect.”

One of the most notable findings was that the impact of COVID-19 news coverage on Asian favorability was stronger among Trump supporters. Trump favorability was measured on a four-point scale, and the researchers found that those with the most positive views of Trump were more likely to let COVID-related grievances shape their views of Asians. This pattern was especially pronounced when looking at new COVID-19 deaths: Trump supporters showed a steeper decline in Asian favorability as the death toll rose, suggesting they were more susceptible to framing that linked the pandemic to China and, by extension, to Asians broadly.

“Because the Trump administration engaged in negative rhetoric about the Chinese origins of the virus, we considered whether the effects of COVID news coverage and state COVID cases was enhanced among Trump supporters compared to Trump opponents,” Garand said. “Indeed, we found that the effects of our COVID variables was significantly stronger among Trump supporters, suggesting that they were most responsive to Trump’s rhetoric about China.”

The researchers also looked at differences across racial and ethnic groups. They found that COVID-19 news coverage had the strongest negative effect on Asian favorability among Black and Hispanic respondents.

“We considered the degree to which COVID effects differed among different racial/ethnic groups, hypothesizing that racial groups that were most susceptible to the negative consequences of COVID should be most sensitive to the effects of COVID variables,” Garand said. “We find this to be the case, with the effects of COVID news coverage strongest among Black and Hispanic respondents, both groups of which suffered the negative consequences of COVID at a higher level than other racial/ethnic groups.”

For Asian respondents, the effect was smaller and not statistically significant. This suggests that individuals were less likely to reduce their favorability toward their own group in response to pandemic-related stress or media coverage.

To test the idea that the effect of the pandemic on group favorability was specific to Asians, the researchers conducted a comparison. They looked at whether COVID-19 news coverage also lowered favorability toward other racial groups. While small effects were found for Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, the impact on attitudes toward Asians was three times as large. This finding supports the idea that the pandemic uniquely affected how Americans viewed Asians, reinforcing the notion that they were being disproportionately scapegoated.

The new study has several strengths, including a very large sample size, detailed weekly tracking, and robust statistical modeling that accounted for multiple factors such as political ideology, education, income, race, and partisanship. Still, the researchers acknowledged some limitations. The data are observational rather than experimental, meaning that the findings reflect correlations rather than definitive causal effects.

Additionally, the favorability measure did not distinguish between specific Asian subgroups. “One issue that Dan Qi and I have discussed on numerous occasions is the difference in how Americans evaluate Chinese, Asian, and Asian-American people,” Garand noted. “It is clear that the COVID pandemic originated in China, and so it is understandable that Americans might adopt more negative evaluations of China or of ‘Chinese people’ as a result of the pandemic.”

“However, the Nationscape surveys do not ask directly about how Americans evaluation China; had it done so, we believe that we would have seen even stronger negative effects of our COVID variables on evaluations of China. Instead, the Nationscape surveys asked standard questions about how Americans evaluation ‘Asians.’ This could include a wide swath of people with origins in one of the many Asian countries, and of course people from Asian countries were not responsible for the COVID pandemic.”

But in another study, published in Social Science Quarterly in 2024, the researchers found that the COVID-19 pandemic influenced how Americans thought about trade with China. In that study, researchers found that as COVID-19 deaths increased and news coverage of the pandemic intensified, support for tariffs on Chinese goods also rose—particularly among Trump supporters.

The researchers argued that this was a form of “transfer of grievances,” where dissatisfaction or fear caused by one issue—in this case, the pandemic—spilled over into another, less directly related issue such as international trade. Trump’s consistent criticism of China’s trade practices, combined with his linking of COVID-19 to China, may have amplified this effect.

“We speculated that support for China tariffs would have increased as a result of the COVID pandemic,” Garand told PsyPost. “This is exactly what we found. Support among Americans for China tariffs increased after the onset of the COVID pandemic, and we find that COVID variables have a strong effect on Americans’ support for China tariffs. It would seem that Americans did connect China to the COVID pandemic and transferred their grievances with China over the pandemic to support for punitive trade policies with China.”

Taken together, the two studies point to a broader psychological process in which Americans, particularly those who supported Trump, transferred blame and anxiety about COVID-19 onto China and then extended that blame to Asian people in general. The researchers suggest that this process is consistent with well-documented patterns of scapegoating, where members of a group that is perceived as “other” are blamed for negative events, even when they had no direct role in causing them.

The study, “Americans’ Attitudes Towards Asians in the Trump COVID Era,” was authored by Dan Qi and James C. Garand.

The study, “COVID, elite rhetoric, and Americans’ attitudes toward U.S. trade practices with China,” was authored by Dmitriy Nurullayev, Ping Xu, and James Garand.