How Badly Will Trump's Mismanagement Of The Pandemic Hurt The Republican Party In November?

Starting To Lose My Temper by Nancy Ohanian

Writing for New York Magazine, Eric Levitz introduced his readers to a new study by political scientists Lynn Vavreck, Christopher Warshaw and Ryan Baxter-King who examined the political consequences of COVID-19 fatalities for Trump and other Republican candidates for federal offices. Their conclusion-- and Levitz's-- is that Voters Are Turning Against Trump In Places Hit Hard By COVID-19. "Although Trump’s political decline is more modest than one might hope," wrote Levitz, "given the widespread tendency of the mass public to rally behind incumbent leaders when faced with an acute crisis-- and the exceptional power of right-wing media in the U.S.-- the fact that the president’s mishandling of the pandemic has turned his reelection into a long shot is cause for encouragement."

He wrote that Vavreck, Warshaw and Baxter-King "set out to determine whether the rise in COVID-19 deaths is directly costing Trump and the Republican Party voter support. To explore this question, they looked at whether areas with a high level of accumulated COVID-19 deaths by the end of May were less likely to support the president and his party, after controlling for all other relevant variables (such as the partisan and demographic composition of areas impacted by the virus and changes in national public opinion during the period in which deaths rose in those areas). Here’s what they found:

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 … 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.

Levitz continued, sadly, that "Ordinary people do not reliably hold their leaders accountable to their interests and avowed preferences in our present social context, which is to say: in a society where civic and communitarian institutions are in decay, economic power is concentrated in the hands of the few, and most people rely on television news for their political information. One could read this fact as an indictment of ordinary people’s capacity for self-government. But it could also be interpreted as an indictment of an economic system and social order that frustrates that capacity. The grotesque class and regional inequalities that define American social life were not born of tyrannical majorities but of reactionary and/or technocratic elites who enacted regressive tax, trade, and monetary policies, often in defiance of popular preferences. (And, of course, the most democratic features of America’s constitutional order were not what put Donald Trump in the White House; its most counter-majoritarian did.)

The study from Vavreck, Warshaw, and Baxter-King suggests that when voters are exposed to the worst consequences of Trump’s misgovernance-- not through cable news or social media but through the lived experiences of friends and neighbors-- they become more likely to hold their leaders to account. To improve and fortify our democracy, we must strive to provide Americans with the tools, information, and social institutions necessary to make the less spectacular failures of governance politically salient.

The 3 researchers concluded that "COVID-19 deaths could cost Trump and other Republicans several percentage points in the 2020 election. This could swing the presidential election toward Democrats, with particularly high effects in swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Florida. All of these states had tight margins in the 2016 presidential election. Michigan’s margin was particularly narrow (.2%) as was New Hampshire’s (.4%), suggesting that COVID-related fatalities may be consequential not only at the individual level in 2020, but also in terms of Electoral College results. In addition, a number of swing Senate elections are in states currently suffering from an explosion of COVID-19 cases, including Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas. The growing pandemic increases Republicans’ vulnerability in these crucial states. These narrow margins in recent elections, coupled with the realization that fatalities from COVID-19 are not unlike casualties of war in voters’ minds, suggest that a winning strategy for President Trump and other Republican candidates on the ballot in 2020 should be to adopt mitigation strategies to limit the spread and consequences of COVID-19 in the American population. Increasing fatalities from the disease lead to losses for Republicans."