Trump faces virus spike inMidwest
OSHKOSH, WIS. » Gabe Loiacono is the kind of voter President Donald Trump can ill afford to lose. He lives in a pivotal county of a swing state that is among a handful that will decide the presidency.
A college history professor who last cast a ballot for a Democrat more than 20 years ago, Loiacono is voting for Democrat Joe Biden because he thinks Trump has utterly failed in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“President Trump still does not seem to be taking the pandemic seriously enough. I wish he would,” said Loiacono. He said he never thought of Trump as “all bad” but added, “There is still too much wishful thinking and not enough clear guidance.”
And now the virus is getting worse in states that the Republican president needs the most, at the least opportune time. New infections are raging in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the upper Midwest. In Iowa, polls suggest Trump is in a toss-up race with Biden after carrying the state by 9.4 percentage points four years ago.
Trump’s pandemic response threatens his hold on Wisconsin, where he won by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016, said Marquette University Law School pol l director Charles Franklin.
“Approval of his handling of COVID is the next- strongest predictor of vote choice,” behind voters’ party affiliation and their overall approval of Trump’s performance as president, Franklin said. “And it’s not just a fluke of a single survey.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Sunday that among U. S. states, Wisconsin had the third highest rate of new cases for the previous seven days. Iowa was 10th.
Trump won Wisconsin’s heavily blue- collar Winnebago County, which includes Oshkosh, in 2016, after Democratic nominee Barack Obama had carried it in 2012. Today, Winnebago is among the top 10 counties where new Wisconsin COVID cases are being reported, according to data collected by Johns
Hopkins University and compiled by The Associated Press.
The trend is similar in Iowa. Blue- collar Dubuque County was among the state’s 10 counties with the fastest- growing number of cases per capita over the past twoweeks. Trump won the county narrowly after Democrats had carried it since the 1950s.
In Wisconsin, where polling has shown Biden with a slight but consistent advantage, approval of Trump’s handling the pandemic dropped from 51% in March to 41% in October, according to a Marquette University Law School poll. That’s a noteworthy decline considering Trump’s overall approval has fluctuated little and remained in the mid- 40s.