• by Sara Guaglione , October 29, 2020

This is the ninth time the London-based Economist has endorsed a U.S. presidential candidate. The first time was in 1980, with a recommendation to vote for Ronald Reagan. 

It endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The endorsement is online today and will also appear in the October 31 print magazine of The Economist.

The Economist's editorial board argues that Biden “is a good man who would restore steadiness and civility to the White House. He would thus begin the long, difficult task of putting a fractured country back together again.”

On Trump, The Economist noted: “He has never sought to represent the majority of Americans who did not vote for him." It adds: “The most head-spinning feature of the Trump presidency is his contempt for the truth. All politicians prevaricate, but his administration has given America 'alternative facts.' 

"Nothing Mr Trump says can be believed — including his claims that Mr. Biden is corrupt.” 

North America accounts for 55% of The Economist’s 1.6 million print and digital circulation. 

The Economist launched a dedicated U.S. 2020 elections hub, and in June it unveiled its first-ever presidential election forecast model. 

Newspapers have continued to publish endorsements for the upcoming election, which takes place on November 3.

USA Today, which has never before endorsed a presidential candidate, announced last week that it was backing Biden.

As of Monday, Biden has at least 119 endorsements from daily and weekly newspaper editorial boards, according to The Hill’s tally.

President Trump has six.

In September, the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune endorsed Biden, after supporting Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in 2016. So did the conservative Union Leader, a newspaper in Manchester, New Hampshire. The first time it endorsed a Democrat.

Trump’s endorsements come from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, The Boston Herald and the New York Post, among others.

After a controversial endorsement of President Trump by the publisher of Spokane, Washington's The Spokesman-Review (“Donald Trump is a bully and a bigot… We recommend voting for him anyway because the policies that Joe Biden and his progressive supporters would impose on the nation would be worse,” wrote William Stacey Cowles), the newspaper said it will no longer run endorsements and unsigned editorials.

McClatchy only let its papers make a presidential endorsement if they conducted interviews with both Trump and Biden.

Fifteen papers that did not endorse a candidate in 2016 have come out for Biden this year, according to The Hill.