It's Not Going To Be An Easy Road For Biden
Lengthy but good enumeration of the obstacles Biden faces in the coming campaign.
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Trump Has a Gut Feeling About What Covid-19 Means for 2020
It’s not too soon to wonder whether he’s on to something.
By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.
Eidence of President Trump’s mishandling of the current Covid-19 emergency has been building steadily. Most recently, The Washington Post on April 4 (“The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged”) and The Times on April 11 (“He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus”) have put together a carefully constructed case against the administration.
On April 13, Trump added fuel to the fire, declaring at his daily briefing, “When somebody’s president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total. It’s total.” Governors who have challenged his authority to order an end to social distancing and other preventive measures, “know that,” he added, and “they will agree to it.” Trump wasn’t done: “The authority of the president of the United States, having to do with the subject we’re talking about, is total.”
The notion that Trump’s provocative attitude will bring him down on Nov. 3 does not, however, take into account the resilience of his base and the animosity to elite liberalism that Trump has feasted on.
Among those who have captured this resilience and animosity is Charles Murray, the F.A. Hayek Emeritus Chair in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, an intrepid and controversial observer of American politics.
During a 2017 interview with the similarly controversial podcast host Sam Harris, Murray said:
One of the things that struck me most were people who say, “You don’t understand. We don’t particularly like Donald Trump. We are not defending his character, or anything like that. He’s our murder weapon.” And I think that is a pretty short and accurate way of saying what function Trump served.
According to Murray, “the ‘deplorables’ comment by Hillary Clinton may have changed the history of the world.” That comment, all by itself, might have swung enough votes. It certainly was emblematic of the disdain with which the new upper class looks at mainstream America, and mainstream America notices this.
Using Murray’s portrayal of Belmont, Mass. as the epitome of the liberal elite, and the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia as representative of white working class communities, Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard, described Murray’s assessment of Trump in an article written during the 2016 campaign:
The prevailing mood among Clinton loyalists is one of confidence that they will win. The bookies give her a 68 percent probability of being the next president. The mainstream media are also on board, spewing indignation after Trump called on the Russians to help find Clinton’s missing emails.
And yet. For a year, commentators have made the mistake of thinking that things they find outrageous are also outrageous to a majority of voters. But top journalists live in Belmont. They just don’t get what Fishtown folk find outrageous.
Nevertheless, there are some worrisome indicators for Trump.
After an initial rise in his favorability ratings during the last two weeks of March, positive feelings toward Trump have slowly eroded.
Nick Gourevitch, partner and managing director of the Democratic polling firm Global Strategies and a principle in the Democratic polling consortium Navigator Research, has been closely following trends since the coronavirus outbreak began. He emailed the following analysis:
Our first tracker was released March 23rd, which coincided with a period of time after Trump stopped downplaying the virus as much. At that time (March 23rd), we saw his overall approval at minus 2 — 47 percent approve to 49 percent disapprove — which was unusually high for him.” Since then “the generic job approval started to slip and is now minus 5.
Beyond the job ratings, Gourevitch continued,Voters remain incredibly sour on his early response to the outbreak with 62 percent saying he did not take it seriously enough to start and 28 percent saying he got it about right.
In addition, according to Gourevitch, A majority of voters ascribe negative traits to him as well, including 60 percent who say he is unprepared, 59 percent self-absorbed, and 55 percent chaotic.
One of the crucial questions going into the 2020 election is whether unemployment and widespread financial distress will lift or depress turnout, which groups will cast votes and which will not.
The competition between Republicans and Democrats to place blame on the opposition for the pandemic has already become a central element of the presidential campaign.
The Trump campaign, as Jonathan Swan at Axios writes, has made it clear that it plans to “Hit Biden as ‘soft’ on China.” A Trump digital ad released earlier this month claims that “Biden stands up for China while China cripples America.”
At the same time, independent groups allied with the Democratic Party have been running ads citing Trump’s attempts to downplay the threat the virus posed. In one of these, the growing number of sickened Americans is graphically displayed on the screen in counterpoint to Trump’s dismissals.
There is no precedent for a presidential election taking place during a simultaneous economic and medical crisis, but there have been numerous studies of how the electorate behaves under severe strain.
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