Like Anyone Doubted This Was Going To Happen? COVID-Deaths Are Killing The Trump Campaign

This may well be the Lincoln Project's best-- meaning most raw and brutal-- yet... and most of their ads are homers to begin with! I posted it again because it so perfectly sets up the Lynn Vavreck and Christopher Warshaw NY Times story that correlates the Trump reelection campaign's disintegration so perfectly with his failed response to the pandemic. The topic is How Local Covid Deaths Are Affecting Vote Choice and the one sentence version is "A rise in coronavirus-related deaths in a given community tends to reduce support for Republicans." That should surprise no one. But let me start with half a dozen states that Trump won in 2016 that he's in serious danger of losing in November:

• Arizona- 1,252,401 (48.67%) to 1,161,167 (45.13%)
• Florida- 4,617,886 (49.02%) to 4,504,975 (47.82%)
• Georgia- 2,089,104 (50.77%) to 1,877,963 (45.64%)
• Michigan- 2,279,543 (47.50%) to 2,268,839 (47.27%)
• North Carolina- 2,362,631 (49.83%) to 2,189,316 (46.17%)
• Texas- 4,685,047 (52.23%) to 3,877,868 (43.24%)

All 6 have been hit badly by COVID-Trump. This list is the confirmed cases in each state, along with how many cases per million residents each of these states has:

• Arizona- 165,934 (22,797 cases per million Arizonans)
• Florida- 441,977 (20,578 cases per million Floridians)
• Georgia- 175,052 (16,487 cases per million Georgians)
• Michigan- 87,958 (8,807 cases per million Michiganders)
• North Carolina- 116,299 (11,089 cases per million North Carolinians)
• Texas- 414,877 (14,308 cases per million Texans)

One more list of these 6 states-- the Real Clear Politics average polling spreads (as of July 28):

• Arizona- Biden +4.0 points
• Florida- Biden +7.8 points
• Georgia- Trump +2.7%
• Michigan- Biden +8.4 points
• North Carolina- Biden +3.0 points
• Texas- Trump +0.2 points

Vavreck and Warshaw reported that "Data from over 328,692 interviews in 3,025 counties across the nation suggest that coronavirus-related deaths, like casualties of war, are hurting the president’s approval rating and may cost him and his party votes. The gap between stated voting support for Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. grows by about 2.5 percentage points in Mr. Biden’s favor when a county has extremely high levels of coronavirus-related deaths relative to when it has low levels. These changes may come within counties as the number of virus-related deaths change, or across counties at any given point in time. For example, Covid-19 fatalities exploded in Wayne County in Michigan in April, suggesting a 1.25-point expansion of the gap between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden."

Cases in Maricopa County, in Arizona, have nearly quadrupled in the last two months, suggesting an 0.6-point increase in the vote support gap between the candidates. Other places have seen little impact from Covid-19, such as Wyoming and some Plains states. Our data show that Mr. Trump has continued to do well in those states, perhaps even increasing his share of the vote in recent months.

Republicans running for the U.S. House and Senate lose just as much support as Mr. Trump does when deaths rise locally. It may feel as if all politics is national, but it is not.

Research shows that when people are killed in action during wartime, residents of the place the victims are from tend to hold elected leaders in Congress and the White House accountable. Political scientists have found this to be true for midterm and presidential elections during the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Coronavirus-related deaths seem to be having a similar effect.

...The front lines of the fight against Covid-19 are in local communities where sick people try to get tested and endure quarantine; where some succumb to the disease, often alone; and where doctors fight to provide care.

To understand whether these community-level experiences are affecting people’s views of the president and his party, we need local-level data on both Covid-19 deaths and people’s views of Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans over time-- as the death tolls change place to place. This is a challenge; a typical poll of 1,000 people cannot deliver sufficiently granular data. There are more than 3,000 counties in the country, and the death tolls are changing in each of them in different ways every week.

The Democracy Fund + U.C.L.A. Nationscape Project has been interviewing 6,250 people a week since July 2019. To date, there are more than 300,000 completed interviews spanning every state in the country and most counties. The survey is conducted online and is fielded by the market research firm Lucid.

The data contain more cases in big places like Los Angeles County than in small ones, like Grafton County, N.H., but there are enough people in counties with varying rates of Covid-19 deaths over time to investigate whether a relationship exists.

For our analyses, people in the survey are assigned their county’s per-capita 60-day cumulative number of Covid-19 deaths. The 60-day period is that just preceding the date each person was interviewed. In this way, we capture variation in county-level deaths within counties because people in the same county are interviewed on different days.

Similarly, because people have been interviewed all over the country on the same dates, we also have captured variation across counties at the same moment. Some counties had high Covid-19 death rates in April, while others did not. As we moved into May and June, a different set of counties experienced rising rates. The goal is to figure out whether the differences in Covid-19 deaths per capita in a county at a given point in time are affecting how people plan to vote in 2020 and how they rate the president...

The analyses reveal clear patterns across multiple levels of geography (states and counties) and different offices (president, Senate and House). Local coronavirus fatalities are hurting Republicans running for federal offices.

A doubling of cases per capita in a county over the last 60 days drops Mr. Trump’s two-party vote margin against Mr. Biden by a third of a percentage point — a seemingly small gap, but not when you consider that several recent elections have been won by narrow margins. In 2016, the critical state of Michigan was won by less than a third of a point; Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were won by less than a point. And some places are seeing a tripling or quadrupling of cases.

The news for Republicans running for the House and Senate is equally bad.

A number of swing Senate elections are in states that have experienced recent rises in Covid-19 cases, including Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina. In Arizona, for example, the gap between Senator Martha McSally, the Republican, and her Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly, continues to grow as the state has surpassed 3,300 virus-related deaths (up from 941 on June 2). Local virus fatalities are costing Republicans running for Senate as much as they are costing the president, in a year when Republicans are fighting to hold on to a majority in the chamber.

There are less than 100 days until Election Day, and many Americans will vote even earlier. Voters appear to be holding the president and his party accountable for the increasing number of deaths in communities around the country. Reducing the toll of the virus is in everyone’s best interest in terms of public health. For Republicans, it is also crucial to their electoral prospects.

Although the DCCC hasn't looked at it, a north-central Florida House seat getting ready to flip-- especially with national disgrace Ted Yoho leaving office-- is being contested by progressive Democrat Adam Christensen. "Politics is always personal," he told us yesterday, obviously wise beyond his 26 years. "That’s what a lot of people forget. The things that directly affect your life or those that you love will always be your number 1 concern. Right now the number one thing on everyone mind is whether or not they will get sick, whether they can afford to get sick, and what happens to their ability to survive if they do get sick. Any politician that can’t (or won’t) answer that question is going to lose support and their election. Florida is no different. The people responsible for those losing their homes, their jobs, and their way of life will be blamed at election time. Florida will be the tipping point as anger and frustration boil over at the ballot box. The era of only caring about the survival of hedge funds and New Jersey bankers is over. The era of putting People above corporations is just beginning."

Julie Oliver, the progressive Democrat, taking on Trump yes-man Roger Williams, told us that "What's happening in Texas-- especially in the Rio Grande Valley, and in working class communities of color across our state that are most severely impacted by coronavirus-- is a humanitarian catastrophe, made so much more frustrating because it could have been avoided with strong statewide guidelines. Over 5,000 of our fellow Texans have died. Those are more than just numbers-- they're our moms, dads, sons, daughters, family members, friends, fellow human beings. We have got to stop allowing politicians who do not believe in science and who have spent decades defunding our healthcare infrastructure undo the hard-fought sacrifices so many have made. We have to let data, not politics, guide public health decisions. Texas politicians need to listen to medical experts, or get out of the way."