Low approval numbers combined with a growing pandemic that is spreading across the country, as Donald Trump's administration attempts to catch up and get a handle on it, could combine to deny the president a second term writes a Bloomberg columnist.
As voters head to the polls on Super Tuesday looking for a suitable candidate to take on Donald Trump in November, the president is facing two factors that may be out of his control to stop and could contribute to a humiliating defeat.
According to Bloomberg's Jonathan Bernstein, "There’s mixed news for Trump as far as his popularity is concerned. On one hand, he spiked up to a new post-honeymoon high just after the trial ended, reaching 44.3% approval as estimated by the FiveThirtyEight polling aggregator. On the other hand? To begin with, 43% isn’t any good."
Bernstein went on to note that only one former president in the modern polling era had worse numbers than Trump at this point -- George H.W. Bush who lost re-election.
And that is not even the worst news for Trump, with Bernstein pointing out that Trump's disapproval numbers are ratcheting upward, and writing, "... he’s back up to 52.7% now, which is basically where he’s been with some minor ups and downs since May 2018. That’s the worst of any polling-era president at the 1,138-day mark. It’s hard to dismiss the possibility that a bit over half of the U.S. public has made a final decision against him."
Stating that alone is not enough to make the case that Trump will lose, the columnist suggested a bungled response to the coronavirus could drive those disapproval numbers even higher and put re-election out of reach.
"Unfortunately for Trump, the way public opinion usually works on issues like this isn’t on his side. If everything goes well — the virus is contained quickly with little damage — then people won’t care about it, and they won’t credit the president for solving something that was never really there in the first place. If, however, things don’t go well, people will tend to blame the president and his party regardless of whether it makes sense or not," he wrote before adding that economic fallout for the growing pandemic would be another crippling blow to Trump's re-election campaign.
Writing "... people tend to blame the incumbent for bad economic times and credit him or her when things go well, regardless of why things are good or bad," Bernstein added, "What’s more, successful election forecasts suggest that economic indicators from the second quarter of the election year are the most important ones for predicting the election outcomes, and that’s just when the worst effects are probably going to take place. Some have speculated that partisan polarization will protect Trump if the economy goes bad — that his Republican supporters will simply blame someone else — but while we can’t say for sure, it’s likely that only applies to Trump’s strongest supporters. And a president’s strongest supporters are never enough to win re-election."
"The truth is that spin isn’t going to matter nearly as much as results," he wrote before predicting, "The bad news for Trump is that even if he does everything correctly, good results may be beyond the government’s control. But whatever he can do to reduce the damage from the pandemic will help him in November — and, of course, help the country as well."
You can read more here (subscription required).
