We’re almost a month from the end of the Senate impeachment trial. Time to check in on President Trump’s approval ratings — and see how the coronavirus could affect his re-election prospects.
There’s mixed news for Trump as far as his popularity is concerned. On one hand, he spiked up to a new post-honeymoon high just after the trial ended, reaching 44.3% approval as estimated by the FiveThirtyEight polling aggregator. And while he didn’t remain at his peak, he’s managed to retain some of his gains. He’s at 43.2% approval now, and hasn’t dipped below that point for a month — which makes this past month easily his best on this measure since March 2017.
On the other hand? To begin with, 43% isn’t any good. Of the elected first-term presidents during the polling era, only George H.W. Bush was doing worse at this point, and of course he lost his re-election bid. So did Jimmy Carter, who was doing better than Trump. The presidents who were re-elected were all at 47.1% (Barack Obama) or better. The even worse news is that Trump’s disapproval rating hasn’t improved that much. He did dip down to as low as 51.5% disapproval briefly, but he’s back up to 52.7% now, which is basically where he’s been with some minor ups and downs since May 2018. That’s the worst of any polling-era president at the 1,138-day mark. It’s hard to dismiss the possibility that a bit over half of the U.S. public has made a final decision against him.
That doesn’t mean he can’t be re-elected. There’s some evidence that approval ratings for an incumbent tend to rise a bit during an election year, all else being equal. He could do better among voters than among the population at large. His voters could be well-distributed, so that he wins the electoral college while losing the national vote again. It’s even possible that the polls underestimate his popularity — although remember that in 2018 the midterm results were consistent with what the polls had been saying about Trump, so I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in that possibility.
Of course, each of those maybes has an equal and opposite downside. And that’s where the virus comes in.
Unfortunately for Trump, the way public opinion usually works on issues like this isn’t on his side. If everything goes well — the virus is contained quickly with little damage — then people won’t care about it, and they won’t credit the president for solving something that was never really there in the first place. If, however, things don’t go well, people will tend to blame the president and his party regardless of whether it makes sense or not. (There’s some evidence that incumbents even get blamed for bad weather and other things that no one thinks are within the control of government.)
And then there’s the virus’s effects on the economy. Again, people tend to blame the incumbent for bad economic times and credit him or her when things go well, regardless of why things are good or bad. What’s more, successful election forecasts suggest that economic indicators from the second quarter of the election year are the most important ones for predicting the election outcomes, and that’s just when the worst effects are probably going to take place. Some have speculated that partisan polarization will protect Trump if the economy goes bad — that his Republican supporters will simply blame someone else — but while we can’t say for sure, it’s likely that only applies to Trump’s strongest supporters. And a president’s strongest supporters are never enough to win re-election.
The best way for Trump to deal with all of this is simply good public policy: Contain and control the coronavirus, mitigate the effects when it does spread, reduce panic, and boost the economy. Easier said than done! What Trump shouldn’t worry about is short-term spin, especially to the extent that it interferes with good policy. But that seems to go against his instincts; Trump remains fixated on short-term public-relations strategies aimed at his strongest supporters, and that’s not going to do him any good here. In other words, he needs more concern about getting accurate and useful information to the public, fewer attempts to minimize what’s happening, and more attempts to lower expectations so that any more “Mission Accomplished” moments are avoided.
The truth is that spin isn’t going to matter nearly as much as results. The bad news for Trump is that even if he does everything correctly, good results may be beyond the government’s control. But whatever he can do to reduce the damage from the pandemic will help him in November — and, of
course, help the country as well.
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