Trump: Why the GOP is panicking
President Trump’s re-election hopes look “increasingly precarious,” said Josh Kraushaar in the National Journal. The humming economy he’d planned on riding to victory has been flattened by the pandemic. Slumping approval ratings show he’s squandered his initial “‘rally around the flag’ bounce” with his mismanagement of the crisis and bizarre, self-congratulatory press conferences. Democrats have unified behind Joe Biden, foiling GOP hopes for a protracted “civil war.” And a host of polls show Biden leading both nationally— with a range of 6 to 10 points—and in every key swing state. Pundits remembering 2016’s upset will hedge their bets, but the fact is that short of a major economic turnaround in the fall, “Trump is now a decided underdog.” His poll slide is triggering GOP panic, said Henry Olsen in The Washington Post. Party leaders fear he’ll “drag down the entire party this fall,” putting the Senate in Democratic control along with the House.
Trump has hit a rough patch, but “is on course for re-election,” said political science professor Joshua Sandman in TheHill.com. National polls don’t make for “a nuanced analysis,” and Trump can again lose the popular vote while winning the Electoral College. Biden is a lackluster candidate who fails to excite young voters; his campaign performances “have ranged from inarticulate to incoherent.” Trump’s base, meanwhile—the white working class, evangelicals, and social and cultural conservatives—remains unshakable. A lot can happen between now and November, said Ella Nilsen in Vox.com. “There are still seven months of what’s sure to be a knives-out campaign,” and Trump goes into it with “a significant war chest and fundraising advantage.”
The truth is that “no one can predict how this election will go,” said Jonathan Bernstein in Bloomberg.com. Voters typically punish an incumbent for a bad economy, but “there’s no precedent for in effect deliberately inducing a recession to save lives.” Traditional voting models may not apply during an unprecedented pandemic. Democrats traumatized by 2016 still fear Trump is “Houdini’’ who can magically pull this out, said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. But his delayed, bungled response to the pandemic has horrified all but his hardcore supporters. Lies and self-promoting bluster can’t make “a mountain of corpses’’ go away. Since he launched his political career, Trump has been incredibly lucky. “But here’s the thing about luck: It runs out.”