Trump's Pandemic Policies Aren't Killing Enough People To Impact His Vote Totals, But It's The People Left Behind Who Will Get Their Revenge In November

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I was making fun of the professional prognosticators for rating Montana's Senate race a "lean Republican?" I predicted they would all be backing away from that foolishness by summer. It's still mid-May and the National Journal's Hotline Power ratings has already tipped Montana as a viable target for Democrats-- as well as both Georgia Senate seats!

In his Tuesday email, even Charlie "walking on eggs" Cook-- acknowledging the enormity of the implications of a Democratic takeover of the Senate-- ventured to say that the chance of the GOP holding onto the Senate majority, once 66% in Cook-world, is now a "50-50 proposition." For someone as overly cautious and conservative as Cook, that is tantamount saying the Democrats have a lock on a big win for the Senate races. "Now with popular Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock challenging GOP incumbent Steve Daines in Montana," he wrote, "newly-appointed Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler mired in a horrific political situation and the possibility that Republicans could draw an exceedingly weak candidate in what should be a safe seat in Kansas (filing deadline June 1), among other problems adding to previous woes with incumbents Martha McSally in Arizona, Susan Collins in Maine, Cory Gardner in Colorado and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis all in races that are, at best, toss ups. Combine those... with a recession that has effectively eliminated any tailwind that President Trump had been enjoying from a strong economy and it is hard to see his re-election prospects looking anything but more dire by the week. Today there is more than a one-in-three chance that Democrats will win a trifecta in November, the White House, the Senate and the House. The policy and governing implications are enormous." [This morning Cook speculated that both Georgia Senate seats may be competitive!]

Keep in mind that these outcomes are not independent of each other, a Trump victory would be more likely to be accompanied by retention of the Senate, a Trump defeat would raise the odds of Democrats taking over the Senate. This isn't 'coattails," (I don't believe in coattails), but the turnout dynamics, the issue agenda and priorities and the political environment that would exist to re-elect, or defeat Trump would also be in place for a Senate that is already teetering on the edge. Our system isn't quite parliamentary but is getting increasingly more so, the linkage is greater, the ticket-splitting diminishing.

It would be hard to overstate the importance that the combination of President Trump in the White House and a Mitch McConnell-led Republican Senate majority has had on shaping the Federal judiciary. Two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 51 judges on the 13 U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals and 138 Federal District judges have been confirmed under this Trump-McConnell combo, two more Circuit and 40 more district judges are in the pipeline, awaiting confirmation. As enormous as the consequences are and will be for a generation or two, the implications of yet another two or four years of Republicans controlling even more judicial nominations is enough to give most on the left or right heart palpitations, out of either joy or terror.

Moving beyond judicial nominations, the policy implications are incredible as well. Back in the day, one party holding the White House and a House majority but a razor-thin edge in the Senate would find itself greatly stymied, real limits on what they could accomplish. But now, with the threshold for most executive and all judicial confirmations down to a simple majority and the possibility of the filibuster being completely scrapped, the governing implications are head-spinning.  

And the unofficial mouth of Inside-the-Beltway conventional wisen, Josh Kraushaar, noted at the same time that "Republicans are growing increasingly worried that President Trump’s shaky political position will not just cost them the presidency, but also sweep in a Democratic Senate majority and further diminish their House minority. The latest round of polling shows the president losing to Joe Biden, as well as Democrats gaining ground in red-state Senate seats that once looked like long shots, from Georgia to Montana to Kansas. There’s a growing chance that Democrats may capture control of the Senate with a seat or two to spare."

It's horrifying that Schumer has it rigged to make sure the new Democratic Senate majority is a dogged conservative, anti-progressive majority. There's still time do something about that in a few states, especially Colorado, where progressive Andrew Romanoff and conservative John Frackenlooper each is a sure bet to beat walking dead GOP Senator Cory Gardner. Schumer is doing all he can to paint Frackenlooper as inevitable. But he isn't and Romanoff is beating him by every metric but corporate cash, which has gushed into the Frackenlooper campaign. Please consider contributing to Romanoff and the other progressive Senate candidates by clicking on the 2020 Senate thermometer on the right and giving what you can. Back to Kraushaar:

The current political environment is reminiscent of 2008, two years after Democrats swept control of the House and Senate under President George W. Bush. It’s mostly remembered for Barack Obama’s historic election, but the Democrats’ downballot dominance was just as remarkable. Riding deep dissatisfaction with GOP leadership, Democrats expanded their Senate majority to a near filibuster-proof margin and won House seats in some of the most reliably conservative territory in the country.

Like the political environment today, the 2008 election took place in the middle of a national crisis. Back then, the Republican presidential nominee insisted that the fundamentals of the country were strong during a deepening recession. Now a Republican president is publicly insisting he has “met the moment” and prevailed, despite rising death rates and massive unemployment from the coronavirus. Then, as now, a Democratic challenger used the GOP candidate’s own words in devastating attack ads.

As the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman wrote: “The two elections were effectively a single continuous rejection of Republican rule, as some in the GOP fear 2018 and 2020 could become in a worst-case scenario.”

Having covered the 2008 congressional campaigns closely, I’m also struck by how much in common that the two elections share. That year, Democrats netted eight Senate seats, sweeping comedian Al Franken into office while winning races in conservative strongholds such as Alaska and South Dakota as part of a big blue wave. Republicans didn’t even field a candidate in Arkansas, one of the most conservative states on the map. Mitch McConnell faced the closest race of his Senate career, barely defeating a not-ready-for-prime-time Democratic challenger.

“[My race] isn’t going to be a landslide,” McConnell told me at the time. “The president is not popular. The economy is certainly slow, so it’s a much more contested environment.”

Repeat McConnell’s words 12 years later and they hold true today. Look at the wider Senate map, and you can see eerie parallels. A poll conducted by Georgia Republicans shows the state’s senior Sen. David Perdue only polling at 45 percent, just 6 points ahead of Democrat Jon Ossoff. Perdue hasn’t been considered particularly vulnerable, but it’s now plausible to see him locked in a competitive race if the bottom falls out for the president. (This is the “other” Senate election in Georgia, which hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as the special Senate election involving embattled GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler.)

The possibility of other red-state surprises are apparent: The emergence of conservative hard-liner Kris Kobach as a possible Senate nominee in Kansas is giving Democrats an unusual opportunity in a state that hasn’t voted a Democrat to the Senate in nearly 90 years. Gov. Steve Bullock’s entrance into Montana's Senate race is putting Sen. Steve Daines’s seat squarely in play. McConnell even faces well-funded opposition from another not-ready-for-prime-time Democratic challenger in the middle of another crisis. If Republicans lose even one of these red-state seats, the odds that Democrats win an outright majority in the Senate increases dramatically.

Another major storyline this year is the Republican Party’s inability to recruit credible House candidates, particularly in districts that Trump carried in 2016. Many freshman Democrats representing Trump districts aren’t facing tough Republican opposition. Twelve years ago, that dynamic was similarly apparent on the Senate side. Only one Democratic senator faced credible GOP competition that year-- Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu-- and she still coasted to victory over now-Sen. John Kennedy. Then-Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, ran unopposed by Republicans in Arkansas, a state that John McCain comfortably carried.

...[R]ight now, Trump and his Republican party are in dire shape. The history of embattled presidents facing reelection during a worsening crisis doesn’t offer much comfort. Even Trump, always averse to uncomfortable truths, recognizes this.

In a series of half a dozen tweets this week, Paul Krugman asserted that the GOP has given up "on trying to control Covid and reopen the economy; the propaganda arm (Fox and worse) is going all in for conspiracy theorizing and virus trutherism. At one level this shouldn't be surprising. It's the same script the party has followed on climate change, and the virus truthers are a lot like the inflation truthers who insisted that we had runaway inflation under Obama. But what's going on now seems to involve a new level of political recklessness. Climate change takes place over decades; inflation truthers paid no political or personal price for being wrong again and again. But if the virus erupts, it will happen quickly. In other words, the GOP has in effect decided to ignore the science at the clear risk of being held accountable in the near future both for killing thousands and for wrecking the economy, because that's what a premature opening would do. Why take that risk? Partly they may be high on their own supply, no longer able to conceive that there is an objective reality that might be politically inconvenient. Partly I think it's because they know in their hearts that they can't actually do the job of governing. But anyway, we're witnessing a lethal abdication of responsibility whose consequences will be quickly apparent. It's truly awesome to watch."





Earlier today we saw what Republicans in control of the state legislature and state Supreme Court are doing to Wisconsin. It's as if they want to kill people! And in nearly every state where Republicans can, they are making the pandemic worse. Yesterday, writing for the NY Times, Trip Gabriel reported that GOP defiance of Pennsylvania's lockdown has 2020 implications. Pennsylvania has been horribly hit by the pandemic. There are 63,122 cases-- 6th worst in the country-- with 4,320 more confirmed cases yesterday and 4,931 cases per million in the population, the 11th hardest hit state by the metric. And although, predictably, Philadelphia has been hardest hit, cases have spiked in Trump counties as well. This list shows cases + Trump's 2016 percentage of the votes in the 15 worse hit counties:

• Philadelphia- 19,093 cases-- Trump- 15.5%
• Montgomery- 5,583 cases-- Trump- 37.6%
• Delaware- 5,252 cases-- Trump- 37.4%
• Bucks- 4,248 cases-- Trump- 47.8%
• Berks- 3,530 cases-- Trump- 52.9%
• Lehigh- 3,378 cases-- Trump- 45.9%
• Northampton- 2,566 cases-- Trump- 50.0%
• Luzerne- 2,477 cases-- Trump- 58.4%
• Lancaster- 2,364 cases-- Trump- 57.3%
• Chester- 2,008 cases-- Trump- 43.3%
• Alleghany- 1,551 cases-- Trump- 40.0%
• Lackawana- 1,256 cases- Trump- 46.8%
• Monroe- 1,240 cases-- Trump- 48.1%
• Dauphin- 895 cases-- Trump- 46.6%
• Lebanon- 856 cases-- Trump- 65.9%

Gabriel reported that on Monday, addressing county lawmakers, Governor Tom Wolf slammed the GOP with "a stunning rebuke, as resistance to lockdown orders flares around the country." Wolf "a military metaphor to accuse Republican officials of desertion in the battle against the pandemic: 'To those politicians who decide to cave in to this coronavirus they need to understand the consequences of their cowardly act.'"

The normally mild-mannered governor’s comments turned up the temperature of a national debate over the health emergency, one fanned by President Trump as he eggs on protesters at state capitols, including in Harrisburg, and by lawmakers in Congress, where the government’s top health officials warned this week of dire consequences if the economy reopens too soon.

On Thursday, the president arrived in Pennsylvania, one of several battleground states crucial to his re-election, where the political combat over limiting the virus’s death toll or easing its economic devastation could have weighty consequences in November. While 26 percent of the state’s work force has filed for unemployment, the governor is relying on metrics about the virus’s spread to keep many people in their homes and all but “life-sustaining” businesses in populous regions closed.

Republicans, sensing a gut-level anger in exurban and rural areas after nearly two months of restrictions, see an issue with the potential to drive turnout by voters in a state where Mr. Trump, as elsewhere in the industrial and Midwest region, needs a surge of support to repeat his narrow victory of 2016. In Wisconsin, also a swing state, the State Supreme Court sided with Republicans on Wednesday and threw out the stay-at-home order of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. In Texas, armed men have shown up to support businesses defying government orders to stay closed, an extreme sign of the politicizing of social distancing rules.

At the same time, polls show that Mr. Wolf, like other governors moving cautiously and heeding scientific benchmarks to reopen, is enjoying record support, including among many Republicans.

Mr. Trump seemed to address Mr. Wolf on Monday via Twitter. “The great people of Pennsylvania want their freedom now, and they are fully aware of what that entails,” he tweeted. “The Democrats are moving slowly, all over the USA, for political purposes.”

The governor’s accusation of cowardice was directed at officials in half a dozen Republican-led counties that have said they would defy his timeline for reopening businesses. Mr. Wolf has partly lifted restrictions on 37 counties, mainly in rural regions where community spread of the virus is more easily contained.

But with the rest of the state, including its populous southeast, still under a strict stay-at-home order through June 4, officials in some counties said they would ignore the governor and open up starting Friday.

“The health crisis is real, but the economic devastation is real also,” said Josh Parsons, a commissioner of Lancaster County, one of those moving to loosen restrictions despite not meeting all of the governor’s health benchmarks.

He described “chaos on the ground” as people openly disregarded stay-at-home orders in recent weeks. “People have been voting with their feet and going back to work because they have to,” he said.

Some Republican strategists said the issue of reopening Pennsylvania would add motivation to turn out for Mr. Trump against the Democratic Party in November.

“I’ve sensed a very, very strong backlash in, quote, the hinterlands,” said Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Trump narrowly carried Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes in 2016. To compensate for population growth and rising anger at his presidency in the Philadelphia suburbs, which lifted Democrats in recent elections, he needs higher support among white men, with and without college degrees.

“My sense is there is a significant number of voters who did not vote in 2016 for whatever reasons who will be voting for President Trump in 2020, and part of it is this overreach by Governor Wolf,” Mr. Gerow said.

Mr. Gerow may be on strong drugs. The pre-COVID Morning Consult Trump Tracker showed Trump having lost 11 approval points since his inauguration and his net job approval underwater 49-48%. Since the pandemic kicked in, Trump's numbers have submerged. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows Biden beating him 48.3- 41.8%-- a 6.5% spread. The most recent polling (last week in April) was conducted by a Republican polling firm, Harper. It shows 49% of voters ready to vote for Biden and just 43% ready for Trump. Only 23% of respondents say the disagree with Pennsylvania ordering all non-essential businesses closing under threat of criminal prosecution and only 14% disagreed with Pennsylvania closing all schools for the remainder of the school year. 16% disagreed with the governor's stay-at-home orders. I wonder if Mr. Gerow is ready for those odds.

Gabriel noted that "A survey released this week by the Washington Post/Ipsos showed that 72 percent of Pennsylvania adults approved of how the governor has handled the coronavirus outbreak, including 51 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Only 45 percent of all adults in the state supported Mr. Trump’s handling of the outbreak. In addition, seven in 10 Pennsylvanians said the United States should keep trying to slow the virus’s spread even if it means keeping businesses closed. Nearly half of Republicans agreed."

“I’m baffled by what the Republican game plan is here,” said J.J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania. “I guess they think this will rally their base, but it seems to speak to a narrow base that is already riled up, while alienating them from the kinds of voters they need to carry Pennsylvania.”

In Lancaster County, as well as others that have moved to reopen despite the governor’s orders, the rate of new coronavirus cases remains higher than 50 per 100,000 people over the previous two weeks, a target Mr. Wolf’s administration set for moving counties to a “yellow” phase of partial reopening. Lancaster County also has one of the highest death tolls in the state, with 183 as of Thursday.

Other counties where Republican officials vowed late last week to defy the governor include Dauphin, Franklin, Lebanon, Berks and Schuylkill, roughly the region from the Philadelphia exurbs west to Harrisburg. Some county sheriffs and district attorneys said they would not pursue businesses that opened despite the governor’s orders. On Wednesday, after Mr. Wolf warned that defiant counties would face consequences, Dauphin County’s commissioners backed down and said they would not unilaterally move to yellow status.

Mr. Parsons, the Lancaster County commissioner, and other local Republican officials argue that the county has met more important metrics for reopening than the growth of new virus cases, including the availability of intensive-care beds and ventilators in hospitals. Deaths are high because the county has many nursing homes, he said.

“We need to protect those people in nursing homes, but that doesn’t mean some people can’t safely and prudently go back to work,” Mr. Parsons said.

On Monday, Mr. Wolf threatened to withhold federal coronavirus relief money from counties that disobeyed him and reopened early.

He also told business owners who reopened too early that they risked losing certificates of occupancy, liquor licenses and insurance. “Insurance does not cover things that happen to businesses breaking the law,” he warned.