Has Donald Trump been digging his electoral grave?
This pandemic has knocked a huge hole in President Trump’s hopes of re-election, said Josh Kraushaar in the National Journal. It has flattened the “humming economy” on which he’d planned to ride to victory. And his dire mismanagement of the crisis and bizarre, self-congratulatory press conferences have completely negated the initial “‘rally around the flag’ bounce” he enjoyed at the start of the crisis. A host of polls show his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, leading both nationally and in every key swing state. Short of a major economic turnaround in the autumn, “Trump is now a decided underdog”. His poll slide is making fellow Republicans very nervous, said Eric Lutz in Vanity Fair. Just how alarmed they are can be gauged by a recently leaked memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It advises GOP candidates not to waste political capital defending Trump over the pandemic, but to try instead to shift the blame onto China.
The president has hit a rough patch, said Joshua Sandman on TheHill.com, but make no mistake: he’s still “on course for re-election”. You shouldn’t read too much into polls showing Biden ahead in the popular vote. Such polls don’t indicate how likely people are to vote. Trump’s base – the white working class, evangelicals, and social and cultural conservatives – remains unshakeable. The lacklustre Biden, by contrast, signally fails to excite young voters. Besides, Trump doesn’t even have to win the popular vote to return to the White House. He just has to win the Electoral College, as he did in 2016.
It’s true that Biden isn’t the strongest of candidates, said Michelle Cottle in The New York Times. Indeed, many Democrats are worried that he has become “invisible” on the campaign trail, and think he needs to push himself into the foreground more in order to convince voters that he is a “smarter, steadier alternative” to Trump. “Why, frustrated supporters fret, won’t he fight for a higher profile?” But actually, not only would it be hard for Biden to make the running at this stage – it would be counter-productive. Biden’s messaging on the pandemic may not be “breaking through”, but the latest polls show that voters trust him to handle the virus far more than they do Trump. So it makes sense for him to leave the spotlight on the beleaguered president. As a former Democratic aide put it: “When a guy’s digging his own grave, you don’t fight him for the shovel.”