Will The Republican Plague Lead To Voters Repudiating Trumpism In Landslide Proportions?

Four months before people will be filling in their absentee ballots Trump's national approval rating has been cratering. The latest Ipsos poll for Reuters, shows him with just 37% approving (+2% leaning towards approval) and 55% disapproving (and again with 2% leaning towards disapproval). Among registered voters, the poll shows Biden leading Trump 47-37%.

When it comes it his actions on confronting the pandemic, he's a dead man walking-- Only 17% strongly approve, while 44% strongly disapprove. And with the pandemic sweeping through Trump strongholds in Texas, Florida, Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina, Iowa and North Carolina and starting to come on strong in Oklahoma and Missouri, voters who "somewhat approve" and "lean" approve are going to increasingly move towards disapprove. The latest Georgia poll, for example, just came out from Fox News. Keeping in mind that Trump beat Hillary by over 5 points-- 50.44% to 45.35%-- the new poll must be panicking the Trump campaign. Biden is actually leading Trump 47-45%. When asked who will do a better job handling the coronavirus, Biden leads Trump by 4 points. Trump's overall disapproval is 51% with just 47% approving.

Yesterday, a Politico headline went right to the crux of the matter: A Sun Belt time bomb threatens Trump’s reelection. Natasha Korecki and Marc Caputo wrote that the explosion of COVID-19 cases in Sun Belt states is becoming another albatross for Trump's campaign and "Republican governors in Florida, Arizona and Texas followed Trump’s lead by quickly reopening their states while taking a lax approach to social distancing and mask-wearing. Now each of them is seeing skyrocketing coronavirus caseloads and rising hospitalizations, and Republican leaders are in retreat. It’s hard to overstate the gravity of the situation for Trump: Lose any one of the three states, and his reelection is all but doomed. Liberal outside groups and the Biden campaign have launched digital and TV ads in Florida, Arizona and Texas hitting Trump for allowing a second wave of coronavirus. The developments have buttressed Biden’s main argument against Trump: that he’s incapable of bringing stability or healing in a time of crisis... Trump’s campaign accuses Democrats of exploiting tragedy."

These are the Sunday ---> Monday new cases and the (number of cases per million people) in these 4 states:

• Florida +8,530 (6,568 cases per million) ---> 5,266 (8,814 cases per million)
• Texas +4,330 (5,283 cases per million) ---> 6,135 (5,494 cases per million)
• Arizona +3,857 (10,154 cases per million) ---> 3,079 (10,577 cases per millions)
• Georgia +2,225 (7,272 cases per million) ---> 2,207 (7,480)

Korecki and Caputo summarized the situation in each state and certainly Florida and Arizona look dire for Trump at this point. Phoenix Congressman Rubin Gallego, they wrote, "expects hospitalizations and deaths to rise in the coming weeks in the state. 'Ballots drop in October. The president essentially has two months to try to turn this around in Arizona,' Gallego said. By then, 'What’s going to be on the TV is Covid-19.' In late March, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey issued an executive order barring local governments from requiring masks in public. Two weeks ago, Ducey reversed himself amid pressure from mayors, residents and health care professionals. As infections surged, Trump held a rally last week with thousands at a Phoenix mega-church, where photos showed the crowd sitting in close proximity and few wearing masks. Ducey brushed off calls to cancel the event. Days before, Phoenix required mask-wearing, but the city order was ignored. 'We’re going to protect people’s rights to assemble in an election year,' Ducey told reporters at a press conference last week, defending his decision to wait until after the Trump event to emphasize to all Arizonans to wear masks. Trump won Arizona by just three-and-a-half percentage points in 2016, with the help of suburban voters. 'Those suburbs that initially won Arizona for Trump have soured since,' said Mike Noble of OH Predictive Insights, who polls the state for non-partisan clients."

Texas is a harder nut to crack for Democrats, who haven't had a presidential win since Carter ran in 1976 but demographics are moving blue and the Democrats flipped 2 congressional seats last cycle and look likely to win 4 more this year (TX-10, TX-21, TX-23 and TX-25). strong Democratic campaigns in districts previously ignored by Democrats, will help the top of the ticket and if Biden campaigns there-- Hillary ignored the state except for fundraising among corrupt elites-- Texas could flip.

Gov. Abbott "moved to reopen Texas in early May even though it had not met benchmarks set by the Trump administration. The state had one of the shortest shutdown in the country. At the time, Trump applauded Abbott. 'Texas is opening up and a lot of places are opening up. And we want to do it, and I’m not sure that we even have a choice,' Trump said during an Oval Office meeting on May 7 with Abbott. 'I think we have to do it. You know, this country can’t stay closed and locked down for years.' Texas soon saw the proportion of coronavirus tests that came back positive spike to nearly 12 percent, in addition to a record-breaking number of hospitalizations. Last week, Abbott said Covid-19 'is now spreading at an unacceptable rate in Texas, and it must be corralled.' He ordered bars to re-close and restaurants to limit capacity to 50 percent, down from 75 percent." That isn't enough to slow anything down much and by the time people are voting, Houston won't be the only city without hospital capacity for new patients.

"Of the three states," wrote Caputo, "only Florida has been a true presidential swing state in recent decades. If Trump loses its 29 Electoral College votes, his chances of a second term are close to zero. The Real Clear Politics polling average in Florida has Biden ahead by nearly 7 percentage points. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a staunch Trump ally, has offered mixed messaging in response to coronavirus. He's repeatedly boasted about his 'data-driven' approach but refused to heed advice from medical experts who say that a statewide mask-wearing order would work. While DeSantis said he was deferring to local governments, Republicans filed a lawsuit last week when a mask-wearing ordinance was passed by Leon County, where the state Capitol is located. 'Our people are ticked off. Most of them are upset about the media coverage about the coronavirus and feel it’s overblown and it’s part of a strategy to bring down the president,' said Evan Power, chairman of the county GOP, the plaintiff in the lawsuit."

Blue America is in the middle of a campaign to support state legislative candidates running in red districts that have not even been contested by the hapless Florida Democratic Party in recent years. If nothing else, these candidates are going to turn out votes up the ballot. Some may also win because of the anti-Republican tsunami headed towards Florida. The Blue America Florida thermometer on the right will allow you to contribute to progressives running for Congress, state Senate and state House, all in one place. Even a dollar to each candidate will help.

"While many Democrats have watched their poll numbers rise as they’ve handled coronavirus," continued Caputo, "DeSantis’s approval ratings have dropped (though, unlike Trump, he’s still above water). Emboldened Democrats released an ad on Twitter last week contrasting DeSantis’s swagger in late May with the recent rise in coronavirus infections. State Democratic Party Executive Director Juan Peñalosa said he’s considering putting money behind the ad because 'it struck a nerve. Trump has botched every stage of this response and people are starting to see DeSantis as Trump’s lapdog,' Peñalosa said." This is the ad:





Dr. Elias Zerhouni was director of the National Institutes of Health in 2005 when George W. Bush was president. Yesterday he assessed Trump's response to the pandemic for NPR:

It was basically amateur hour. There is no central concept of operations for preparedness, for pandemics, period. This administration doesn't want to or has no concept of what it takes to protect the American people and the world because it is codependent. You can't close your borders and say, "OK, we're going to be safe." You're not going to be able to do that in this world. So it's a lack of vision, basically just a lack of understanding, of what it takes to protect the American people.

I bet Dr Zerhouni has a very high IQ-- a lot higher than the doofus who can't even put on a mask

It's what I call the boom and bust of preparedness. The old saying that we use for NIH is if you think research is expensive, try disease. And in this case, Claire Pomeroy from the Lasker Foundation came up with a different sentence: "If you think preparedness is expensive, try a pandemic." That's where we're living. It's a result of lack of preparation and short-term thinking.

What people are thinking of as the Republican Plague is causing businesses and governments to pull back from opening up plans. Some have reimposed restrictions. Voters are blaming Trump and his puppet governors like Abbott, DeSantis, Ducey and Kemp. CNN reported that with July 4 approaching, "officials are trying not to repeat scenes from Memorial Day, when thousands across the country flocked to beaches, bars and parties while experts cautioned the crowds could lead to spikes in cases down the road. Remember, the U.S. accounts for just 4% of the world's population, but because of Trump's incompetence and malignant narcissism, our country has 25% of the cases and deaths, At least 12 states-- or parts of states-- have slammed on the brakes, including Texas, California, Florida, Washington.

The Republican Plague?

From When He Came by Nancy Ohanian

"The Department of Justice has confirmed the existence of a memo laying out its rationale for not bringing charges against President Trump," wrote Conor Shaw and Anne Weismann on Friday morning, "but it refuses to make its reasoning public. In response to ongoing litigation involving a Freedom of Information Act request by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, DOJ turned over a heavily redacted version of one of the most important legal documents the American people have never seen: the official grounds for not charging Trump with obstruction of justice."

Ultimately, it won't be his fascism that drives Trump from office, though. It will be his incompetence in the face of the pandemic, something more and more frequently being called #TheRepublicanPlague. As Paul Krugman noted in a New York Times editorial yesterday, it has been Trump-- and his acolytes who have crippled America's response to the pandemic, not the American people. Like many people, Krugman notes that all the sacrifices Americans made to fight the pandemic's first five months in America have been squandered by the Trumpists. As he wrote, we never really got the coronavirus under control and now infections are surging in most of the country. "And the bad news isn’t just a result of more testing. In new hot spots like Arizona-- where testing capacity is being overwhelmed-- and Houston the fraction of tests coming up positive is soaring, which shows that the disease is spreading rapidly. It didn’t have to be this way. The European Union, a hugely diverse area with a larger population than the U.S., has been far more successful at limiting the spread of Covid-19 than we have. What went wrong?"

The simple answer is obvious: America's leadership is what went wrong: Trump and Trumpism failed us. Krugman is more nuanced:

The immediate answer is that many U.S. states ignored warnings from health experts and rushed to reopen their economies, and far too many people failed to follow basic precautions like wearing face masks and avoiding large groups. But why was there so much foolishness?

Well, I keep seeing statements to the effect that Americans were too impatient to stay the course, too unwilling to act responsibly. But this is deeply misleading, because it avoids confronting the essence of the problem. Americans didn’t fail the Covid-19 test; Republicans did.

After all, the Northeast, with its largely Democratic governors, has been appropriately cautious about reopening, and its numbers look like Europe’s. California and Washington are blue states that are seeing a rise in cases, but it’s from a relatively low base, and their Democratic governors are taking actions like requiring [meh-- "requiring" without enforcement is not requiring] the use of face masks and seem ready to reverse their reopening.

So the really bad news is coming from Republican-controlled states, especially Arizona, Florida and Texas, which rushed to reopen and, while some are now pausing, haven’t reversed course. If the Northeast looks like Europe, the South is starting to look like Brazil.

Nor is it just Republican governors and state legislatures. According to the new New York Times/Siena poll, voters over all strongly favor giving control of the pandemic priority over reopening the economy-- but Republican voters, presumably taking their cue from the White House and Fox News, take the opposite position.

And it’s not just about policy decisions. Partisanship seems to be driving individual behavior, too, with self-identified Democrats significantly more likely to wear face masks and engage in social distancing than self-identified Republicans.

The question, then, isn’t why “America” has failed to deal effectively with the pandemic. It’s why the G.O.P. has in effect allied itself with the coronavirus.

Part of the answer is short-term politics. At the beginning of this year Donald Trump’s re-election message was all about economic triumphalism: Unemployment was low, stocks were up, and he was counting on good numbers to carry him through November. He and his officials wasted crucial weeks refusing to acknowledge the viral threat because they didn’t want to hear any bad news.

And they pushed for premature reopening because they wanted things to return to what they seemed to be back in February. Indeed, just a few days ago the same Trump officials who initially assured us that Covid-19 was no big deal were out there dismissing the risks of a second wave.

I’d suggest, however, that the G.O.P.’s coronavirus denial also has roots that go beyond Trump and his electoral prospects. The key point, I’d argue, is that Covid-19 is like climate change: It isn’t the kind of menace the party wants to acknowledge.

It’s not that the right is averse to fearmongering. But it doesn’t want you to fear impersonal threats that require an effective policy response, not to mention inconveniences like wearing face masks; it wants you to be afraid of people you can hate-- people of a different race or supercilious liberals.

So instead of dealing with Covid-19, Republican leaders and right-wing media figures have tried to make the pandemic into the kind of threat they want to talk about. It’s “kung flu,” foisted on us by villainous Chinese. Or it’s a hoax perpetrated by the “medical deep state,” which is just looking for a way to hurt Trump.

The good news is that the politics of virus denial don’t seem to be working. Partly that’s because racism doesn’t play the way it used to: The Black Lives Matter protesters have received broad public support, despite the usual suspects’ efforts to portray them as rampaging hordes. Partly it’s because the surge in infections is becoming too obvious to deny; even Republican governors are admitting that there’s a problem, although they still don’t seem willing to act.

The bad news is that partisanship has crippled our Covid-19 response. The virus is winning, and all indications are that the next few months will be a terrifying nightmare of rampant disease and economic disruption.