Are Democrats using the COVID-19 pandemic to rig the 2020 election against President Trump?

This appeared in The Millennial Source

In a presidential election year, politicians and pundits tend to view everything through a political lens. It is standard practice for talking heads and opinion writers to discuss what an event — a mass shooting, a natural disaster, even a hypothetical giant meteor — means for the election. It is, thus, inevitable that people are filtering the COVID-19 pandemic through this same political lens.

Rather than acting as a referendum on the leadership ability of President Donald Trump, though, some conservative commentators have framed the ongoing crisis as a political distraction by the Democratic Party.

These pundits aren’t directly arguing the coronavirus — which is responsible for over 160,000 American deaths — is fake. They argue instead that the risk of the virus has been overhyped to give former Vice President Joe Biden cover and to use mail-in voting to steal the election.

“The greatest rigging of an American election”

Multiple conservative pundits, as well as Trump himself, have stated that the media and Democrats are conspiring together to rig the election. The president and his allies have been arguing since well before COVID-19 reached the United States that there would be attempts to steal the election from him through various means.

The most recent line of argument, as articulated by popular conservative pundit (and one-time anti-Trump blogger) Candace Owens, is that the COVID-19 crisis is merely a tactic to rig the 2020 election. In an interview with the Daily Caller posted on August 4, she stated, “This is the greatest rigging of an American election that we are all playing a part in right now.”

As Owens frames it, the Democrats’ coronavirus-based strategy is threefold: hide Biden from the public, keep Trump from traveling and having campaign events and swap in-person voting for…