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It absolutely was. The skyrocketing unemployment - nearly 15% at its peak - left millions of people with nothing to do but protest. Unemployment waves and protest movements are practically joined at the hip.
The right-wing anti-vax movement got similar energy off a bunch of newly-unemployed reactionaries, angry at the "lockdown" (more just one more excuse for police to harass unemployed people out in public), and jelling together through online discussion groups. J6 was the direct result of a bunch of small business owners with too much time on their hands.
The Ferguson and Baltimore protests were in 2014 and 2015, culminating in a massive police crackdown in both instances. These protests also followed an ugly downturn following the 2013 Government Shutdown and the sudden stoppage of federal money into a still-recovering post-Great Recession economy. If you go back to '07/'08, you'll find another wave of civil rights protests that largely emerged in the wake of police crack downs on a newly unemployed and unhoused population on the eve of the Great Recession.
But these are symptomatic. The real underlying groundswell of opposition comes from the spike in unemployment, not the protest movement that arises from a bunch of unemployed people with nothing to do.
The Dems saw a tsunami of turnout that crested in the bluest states. MAGA saw a similar swell in turnout, cresting in redder states. They met each other note-for-note in the battleground states, resulting in some very close calls across the Midwest and Atlantic Coast.
This wasn't a close election in terms of gross seats won or votes cast. Just the marginal wins in a few swing states. Had Republicans not also seen a spike in turnout from 2016, all those gerrymandered districts would have bit them in the ass (as happened in '08, '18, and what seems likely in '26). I would give BLM far more credit for the first Trump midterm than the Biden win.
I might argue that the anti-Vax movement saved Republicans more than BLM won it for Democrats.
Yeah but the point is the movement those people funneled into ended up being BLM (or BLM adjacent), because BLM was at its peak in terms of growth and organizing. Had it been 2009, maybe those same people funnel into Occupy Wallstreet. Call it happenstance of history, and I'm not saying that BLM was borne of a whistle and milk from a thistle at twilight the year of 2019. But it was present when people had the time to take to the streets. And my point that the BLM agenda didn't find its way into electoralism until ~2018-2020 is the primary point. It took 10 years, but in 2020, it became a central primary issue among Democrats. The points of grievance found their way into the presidential platform in the 2020 election.
I think to be charitable we'd have to call it a wash. It was practically the same forces funneling people into both movements, and like you said, in-spite of both sides getting more turnout, the resulting victories were marginal. So I come back to the first point, that Trumps government and management of COVID becomes the theme. And if they had just.. not been such moron, if they had even been nominally competent, I think Trump wins the 2020 election handily.