The death of Herman Cain, attributed to the coronavirus, has made Republicans and President Trump face the reality of the pandemic as it hit closer to home than ever before, claiming a prominent conservative ally whose frequently dismissive attitude about taking the threat seriously reflected the hands-off inconsistency of party leaders.Mr. Cain, a former business executive and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, had an irreverent, confrontational style that mirrored the president’s own brand of contrarian politics. In his more recent role as a public face for the president’s re-election campaign, he became an emblem of Trump-supporting, mask-defiant science skeptics, openly if not aggressively disdainful of public health officials who warned Americans to avoid large crowds, cover their faces and do as much as possible to limit contact with others.His view was shared by many conservatives, who have applied a hard-nosed, culture war mentality to the virus, the most serious public health crisis in a century.Mr. Trump wrote in praise of Mr. Cain on Twitter on Thursday, calling him “a Powerful Voice of Freedom and all that is good.”But Mr. Cain’s death showed how ill-suited that mind-set is to the country’s current predicament. More than 150,000 Americans have died in a pandemic that is ravaging parts of the country where conservative leaders long resisted taking steps that have slowed the virus elsewhere, such as mask mandates and stay-at-home orders.Those include places like Tulsa, Okla., where Mr. Cain attended a Trump campaign rally in June and showed his disregard for safety precautions on social media shortly before receiving a diagnosis for the virus.With a uniformity that has defied rising death tolls in their own backyards, Republicans at the federal, state and local levels have adopted a similar tone of skepticism and defiance, rejecting the advice of public health officials and deferring instead to principles they said were equally important: conservative values of economic freedom and personal liberty. More

One surprise with Covid-19 is not what happened but what didn’t happen. Although the pandemic might yet benefit President Trump — through heightened xenophobia, increased acceptance of authoritarian leadership, racial and ethnic schism — the political winds have not, to date, shifted in Trump’s direction. In fact, the opposite is the case. A P.R.R.I. survey […] More

A yearlong effort by a bipartisan group of lawmakers suggests steps to deter attacks, including clearer communication of operations. Source: Elections – nytimes.com More

Welcome to Poll Watch, our weekly look at polling data and survey research on the candidates, voters and issues that will shape the 2020 election.The Trump administration is engaged in a not-so-quiet whisper campaign to cast doubt on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, and other public health officials.President Trump’s team has increasingly questioned Dr. Fauci’s track record, and this week the White House moved to strip the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of control over collection of data on the coronavirus’s spread.All of this lines up with Mr. Trump’s attempts to speed up the reopening process, often in spite of his health advisers’ warnings. Presumably, Mr. Trump is playing the long game, hoping that a return to normal will bring the economy booming back in time for the November election and that the virus could either “fade away” or become preventable by a vaccine.But none of those things have happened so far, and when it comes to public opinion, the president appears to have boxed himself into a corner.After tapering down throughout most of the spring, cases have been rising steadily for the past month, giving pollsters enough time to take a read on how Americans have responded to the virus’s resurgence. More

The progressive magazine The Nation published an open letter last month in which former members of the radical 1960s organization Students for a Democratic Society pleaded with a younger generation of leftists to support Joe Biden for president. The letter, titled “To the New New Left from the Old New Left,” warned that the re-election […] More