Trump won’t ask if we’re better off than in ’16

It’s become the litmus test for U.S. presidents seeking a second term.

For Ronald Reagan, it was simply a way of shifting the conversation away from questions about whether Americans could trust his finger on the nuclear button.

So Reagan used the closing statement of his lone 1980 debate with then-President Jimmy Carter to ask the viewing audience, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

It’s not necessarily a fair question. After all, there are countless outside forces that collide with the best-laid plans of any president.

If you asked voters in 1944 — with 16 million Americans fighting in a world war and folks back home subjected to rationing — whether they were better off than they’d been four years before, a majority probably would have said no. But enough of them understood that their sacrifices had a higher purpose.

Reagan’s question, however, was effective because it tapped into the way voters generally decide whether to renew someone’s lease on the White House.

Over the past 100 years, only three elected U.S. presidents have been voted out of office, and all of them were saddled with bad economies: Herbert Hoover had the Great Depression, Carter had stagflation and an off-the-charts misery index and George H.W. Bush had a downturn that deepened over the course of an election year.

Three months ago, Donald Trump had the economic winds at his back. Unemployment was down to 3.5 percent, growth was steady and the stock market was booming.

You could easily see Trump, in the fall of this year, pulling out some variation on Reagan’s old question, secure in the knowledge that it was a winning card for him.

Everything’s different now. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only taken the lives of nearly 80,000 Americans, it has forced the U.S. economy into hibernation. On Friday, we learned that unemployment had reached 14.7 percent, its highest level since the Great Depression. The U.S. economy lost a record 20.5 million jobs in April, nearly wiping out a full decade’s worth of job creation in the span of 30 days.

“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

That’s not a question Trump wants to ask voters right now.

While much can change in the next six months, it’s almost certain that in November, our businesses will still be hobbling, we’ll still be grappling with COVID-19 and we’ll still be anxiously waiting for a vaccine.

Consequently, Reagan’s 1980 question now works to the advantage of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

A Monmouth University nationwide poll released Wednesday had Biden ahead of Trump by 9 points (50 percent to 41 percent). Two months earlier, Biden led by only 3 points in the Monmouth poll.

A new Hart Research Associates poll found Biden leading Trump in six Senate battleground states — four of which Trump won in 2016 — by 9 points.

One of the most troublesome signs for Trump came from a Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler poll released a week ago. This poll found Biden and Trump tied in Texas, with each garnering 43 percent support.

Texas Democrats have been deluded by promising poll numbers before, and it’s hard to imagine Trump actually losing Texas, but this poll is still some seriously bad news for him.

Texas is the GOP electoral vote firewall; a state that has not gone Democratic since 1976; a state that Mitt Romney carried over Barack Obama by nearly 16 percentage points only eight years ago.

A month ago, Democrats worried that Trump’s daily televised coronavirus briefings were pushing Biden out of the national political conversation. There was open frustration among some Democrats that Biden wasn’t doing much to get his message out.

Keeping a low profile and letting Trump punch himself out, however, might be Biden’s best strategy at the moment.

Ultimately, this election will be a referendum on Trump and there’s little that Biden can say at the moment that could be more damaging to the president than the daily litany of public health and economic news.

Our politics is so tribal these days, and our consumption of news so polarized, it’s difficult for any politician to pierce that armor of partisanship. But a national crisis, and the pain that it produces, can cut through anything.

By nature, we want to rally behind our leaders in times of crisis, and Trump got a small boost in public support in the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak. But his deceptions (falsely blaming Obama for the slow rollout of COVID-19 testing kits), defensiveness and wildly inaccurate promises (saying two months ago that we’d soon drop from 15 COVID-19 cases down to zero) are hard for even his most ardent supporters to deny.

Trump won in 2016 by swaying just enough voters who found him personally obnoxious and crass but believed that he’d get things done. At least some of those voters are up for grabs now, and they could decide this election.