GOP faces election reckoning with Trump’s virus strategy
WASHINGTON » President Donald Trump’s diagnosis with COVID-19 Friday was a moment of reckoning for his Republican Party, whose leaders largely adopted his strategy of downplaying the disease but are now confronted with a stark political nightmare weeks from Election Day.
The president’s infection thrust the pandemic front and center at a time when Republicans would rather be talking about Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, law enforcement or the economy as early voting is underway in the majority of states. They include Iowa and North Carolina, places that Republicansmust win tomaintain their three-vote edge in the Senate.
As Trump headed to Walter Reed military hospital for quarantine, the virus seemed to spill into every corner of the party. Tests came back positive for Republican party chairwoman Rona McDaniel and for Utah Sen. Mike Lee. One of the party’s most vulnerable incumbents, Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, had to take a rapid coronavirus test — he was negative — before facing his Democratic challenger in a debate Friday night.
The pandemic even
spread to a subject the GOP hoped to be its safe harbor in the campaign’s closing weeks — the looming confirmation of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. Videos of an unmasked Lee mingling with other conservative luminaries at a White House ceremony for Barrett ran relentlessly on cable news, turning the party’s push to reshape the court into a story about the spread of a deadly virus.
“It’s challenging,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster active in five competitive Senate races. “It would be better if the discussion was about jobs and the economy, or even Joe Biden is going to be held captive to the left. But the election is going to be about coronavirus, and
that’s not favorable terrain for Republicans.”
In private conversations over recent months, Republicans had reached a level of stoicism about how their fates were yoked to the president’s, even as he ricocheted from outrage to outrage and denied the severity of a pandemic killing thousands of their constituents. Their inability to escape Trump is due partly to their embrace of his personality and agenda, but also to a reality of the nation’s polarized politics — legislators increasingly rise or fall with their party’s presidential candidate.
“People vote for the uniform, red or blue,” Bolger said. “As the president goes, so goes a lot of downticket Republicans.”