Evidence 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.
Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Amber Wichowsky of Marquette, co-authored “Economic discontent as a mobilizer: unemployment and voter turnout.” Burden described by email the complexity of political mobilization during an economic crisis:
“Historically, unemployed individuals have voted at much lower rates than working people,” Burden said, but when unemployment “becomes widespread enough to be perceived as a communal concern rather than an individual predicament” it raises turnout.
In what could spell trouble for Trump, Burden wrote that he and Wichowsky found that
The public becomes agitated by a worsening economic picture and becomes motivated to express their grievances via the ballot box. Voting is a relatively low cost way that the government provides for people to express their displeasure, and the public uses the opportunity more when the employment situation is worse.
In a separate email, Wichowsky wrote that research on voting generally suggests that “there is good reason to suspect that voter mobilization around the economy could hurt Trump’s chances at re-election.”
But, Wichowsky cautioned,
There is a long time between now and November. Voters tend to be fairly myopic. Trump might receive credit if the economy shows some healthy recovery later this year. It’s also not altogether clear whom voters will blame for this crisis.
She pointed out that “President Trump has clearly tried to put the sole blame on China for the spread of Covid-19.”
A second and closely related factor in elections is anger, a powerful tool for mobilizing the discontented. Trump proved this in 2016 as he motivated his angry white voting base.
S. Erdem Aytaç, a professor of political science in the Department of International Relations at Koç University in Istanbul, argues that anger can be a central ingredient in driving voter behavior. He wrote by email to say that an examination of American turnout over 40 years
found that while unemployed people participate in elections at lower rates than the employed in general, the difference between the two groups diminishes when unemployment is high around the election period.
Aytaç, who co-authored the 2018 paper “Beyond Opportunity Costs: Campaign Messages, Anger and Turnout among the Unemployed” with Eli Gavin Rau and Susan Stokes, political scientists at Yale and the University of Chicago, explained the reasons for the varying levels of turnout in his email:
When unemployment is widespread, the opposition draws attention to it in their campaigns and blames incumbents. The unemployed are exposed to messages that stress the government’s responsibility for the dire state of the economy. This, in turn, stokes anger among those hit hardest by the economic downturn.
Aytaç pointed to the crucial role of aggravated, even enraged, voters in elections:
Anger is a well-known mobilizing emotion, and therefore the angry unemployed are more prone to return to the polls.
While Trump is vulnerable to an aggrieved and angry electorate, there are other emotions at play with the potential to work to Trump’s advantage: panic and fear.
In March, Filipe R. Campante, a professor of public policy at Harvard, Emilio Depetris-Chauvin and Ruben Durante, professors of economics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, published a study of the political consequences of an earlier public health scare, “The Virus of Fear: The Political Impact of Ebola in the U.S.”
The Ebola scare hit the United States one month before the 2014 midterm congressional elections. A total of 11 people were treated for Ebola in this country, according to the Centers for Disease Control; two died.
Campante and his colleagues found that:
Heightened concern about Ebola, as measured by online activity, led to a lower vote share for the Democrats in congressional and gubernatorial elections.
Republican candidates, the three authors wrote, “responded to the Ebola scare by mentioning the disease in connection with immigration and terrorism in newsletters and campaign ads,” and the strategy proved effective:
Survey evidence suggests that voters responded with increasingly conservative attitudes on immigration but not on other ideologically-charged issues.
In an email, Campante wrote me:
Quite clearly, the GOP is trying to run the same playbook now — “Chinese virus,” “Wuhan virus,” etc. What the Democrats would need to do to counteract that — again, from the pure psychological perspective — is to find a theme that resonates with voters and helps them.
As both parties and their candidates seek to turn the pandemic to their advantage, there are potential pitfalls for politicians and political parties that are attempting to court voters during a crisis.
Adam Seth Levine, a political scientist at Cornell and the author of the 2015 book “American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction,” wrote by email of the dangers of stressing hardship in an effort to mobilize those suffering the most: The suffering, he said, “are the ones who are demobilized by rhetoric that reminds them of their own resource constraints.”
There are unanticipated adverse consequences to certain strategies, Levine contended: “Appealing to material self-interest is self-undermining when it reminds people of what they don’t have. It persuades but also paralyzes” them by reducing “their willingness to spend scarce resources like money and time that are key ingredients of political activism.”
In “American Insecurity,” Levine makes the case that
on issues that reflect financial constraints that people are facing or worry that they could face in the future, there is an identifiable lack of large-scale political participation that (a) is politically consequential, (b) goes against our expectations, and (c) motivates the need to identify heretofore unrecognized barriers to collective action.
Levine maintained that his warnings about generating citizen “paralysis” also apply to political activism — volunteering, working for a candidate, going door-to-door, whenever that can happen again — as well as to voting.
“Activism is vital for building strong campaigns, yet it’s also typically viewed as more discretionary than voting,” Levine said. He has found, for example, that
when groups try to mobilize uninsured people around the skyrocketing costs of health care, they are demobilized — they are less likely to donate money to support the group and less willing to spend time volunteering with it.
William B. McCartney, a professor of finance at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management, points out that “a large share of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and say they would not be able to come up with $1,000 for an unexpected expense.”
Based on the findings in his 2017 paper, “Does Household Finance Affect Elections? Evidence from a Housing Crisis,” a study of voting in the wake of the 2007-9 financial meltdown, McCartney said by email that he was “deeply concerned that household-level financial distress will decrease turnout, in addition to low turnout caused by the health crisis.”
He bases his fear on the following:
Voting is a costly activity and, when households’ financial situations have deteriorated, they cut back on everything optional. They, rationally, choose not to spend their scarce resources learning where their polling places are and then waiting in line, potentially for hours.
McCartney’s fear of the effects of depressed voter turnout materialized in Wisconsin last week, but it did not prevent a key liberal victory.
The results announced on April 13 of the special Wisconsin State Supreme Court election, in which the liberal Democrat, Judge Jill Karofsky, decisively beat the conservative Republican incumbent, Justice Daniel Kelly, suggest a shift to the left in a key swing state that Trump carried in 2016 by 22,748 votes.
Karofsky won by 163,494 votes, more than 7 times Trump’s margin of victory in 2016, despite the widespread closure of voting precincts in Democratic strongholds because of the health threat. In Milwaukee, for example, just five out of a total of 180 balloting locations were open.
Charles Franklin, a political scientist at Marquette, described the Supreme Court election result as part of a continuous shift to the left in Wisconsin in recent years. “The size of the Republican margin in the red WOW counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — has been shrinking and doing so across multiple races,” he said. At the same time, Franklin pointed out, “the Fox River Valley counties around Green Bay — Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago, are shifting away from Republicans,” while “some blue counties are getting even bluer: Dane, Eau Claire, La Crosse.”
Franklin believes “these changes in the landscape are more indicative of the challenges for November than the court race,” but that the “results add further evidence that this shift is continuing.”
One basic question going into the 2020 election is how widespread the leftward trends seen in Wisconsin are. Were the Democratic House victories in 2018 a precursor or a fluke?
More important are several unknowns: How well equipped is Joe Biden to take full advantage of the wind that might be at his back? Can he negotiate the demands of nationally televised debates, press conferences and extemporaneous speaking on the campaign trail, whatever that ends up meaning this year?
If the Democratic Party is going to focus discontent over the pandemic and the accompanying economic collapse on Trump, it will need its presidential candidate to be able to make the case competently, compellingly and coherently.
This will be especially true if, in the months before the election, the pandemic subsides somewhat, the economy begins to return to normal and Trump gets credit for both.
Trump is a master tactician when it comes to eliding the truth, shifting blame, hurling insults and flaunting his bullying ego. On substance, Trump may offer Democrats an optimal target, which poses the critical question: How good is Joe Biden’s aim?
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
