AIDS and COVID on the Campaign Trail: Reagan and BidenAIDS and COVID on the Campaign Trail: Reagan and Biden

Creator: Daniel Breault ’23 Optical Engineering

Reagan, Trump, and Biden’s presidencies have often been judged mainly by the actions they took (or did not take) with regards to AIDS and COVID-19. But each candidates’ attitudes first emerged on the campaign trail. Shown here is a map with CDC data overlaying a map of COVID-19 cases at the moment Biden won the democratic nomination as well as a map of AIDS cases during the year of Reagan’s re-election campaign. One choice made in the creation of this map was to showcases overall instead of cases scaled by population, this was done to show correlation between key areas each candidate would have had their eye on (as population roughly corresponds to votes in the electoral college). Of striking note is that while both viruses thoroughly spread throughout the US, COVID-19 has far more reported cases than AIDS across the board. This played a large role in shaping the rhetorical and political approaches of each candidate towards the crises.