36 Time August 17/August 24, 2020
Politics
Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, for going “rogue” when
she mailed absentee-ballot applications before the state’s primary—a step
many of her GOP counterparts had also taken. “It is not helpful when false
or misleading information, mudslinging and partisan rhetoric are injected
into the discourse,” Benson tells TIME. “It causes people to have doubts
about the sanctity of the process and the validity of their vote. The truth
is, we are working every day to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
On July 30, Trump suggested postponing the presidential election,
prompting an immediate outcry from Republicans and Democrats alike.
“The concerns the President has raised are not valid in the state of Ohio,”
Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose, a Republican, tells TIME. “Both po-
litical parties in Ohio have trusted our system for 20 years and work hard
to get voters to take advantage of voting by mail.” As for postponing the
election, “That is not something we should even be considering,” he says.
Election experts of both parties worry that Trump’s pernicious cam-
paign to undermine confidence in the election’s integrity is a pretext for
refusing to accept the result if he loses, throwing the nation into consti-
tutional crisis or worse. When a bipartisan group of academics and for-
mer officials called the Transition Integrity Project recently war-gamed
a contested election, every iteration of the exercise produced “both street-
level violence and political impasse,” the group’s organizer, Georgetown
Law professor Rosa Brooks, told the Boston Globe.
When the reality of the pandemic began to set in, Trump’s approval
rating initially went up, as often happens for Presidents in times of crisis.
The percentage of Americans who approve of Trump—which has stayed
within a narrow band throughout his term—reached 46% in late March,
the highest level since his Inauguration, according to the polling average
maintained by FiveThirtyEight. Then it began to plummet.
Today, barely 40% approve of Trump’s performance, while nearly 55%
disapprove. Americans now disapprove of his handling of the pandemic by
a 20-point margin. Biden holds significant leads in key battlegrounds like
Wisconsin, Florida and Michigan. States such as Texas, Arizona and Geor-
gia, which Democrats haven’t won at the presidential level in decades, may
now be up for grabs. Many top Republicans fret that their candidates are in
for a wipeout up and down the ballot. “The breadth and depth of Trump’s
weakness is hard to overstate,” says Democratic pollster Margie Omero,
a member of the Navigator Research team that has
surveyed more than 24,000 Americans on a rolling
basis since March. “There was a little bit of rally-
round-the-flag at the beginning—people wanted
him to succeed—and then when it was clear that
he wasn’t taking it seriously, you saw that change.”
In truth, Trump was an unusually weak incum-
bent long before the pandemic hit, the only Presi-
dent never to top 50% approval in Gallup’s regular
tracking. His current rating remains higher than
his nadir of 35% in August 2017, after the white-
supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va. Demo-
crats’ current 8-point advantage on the generic bal-
lot is about the same as their margin in the national vote in 2018. Biden has
consistently held an edge over Trump, posting margins similar to or greater
than the current state polls since before he even entered the race. A large por-
tion of the American electorate seems to have made up its mind about this
President early on, abandoning him—and his party—and never looking back.
Indicators that normally correlate to incumbents’ political fortunes,
such as the economy, may not apply this year, says GOP pollster Patrick
Ruffini. The situation is simply too anomalous.
Many people see the pandemic as a fluke wrought
by China, and may be receptive to the argument that
the economic pain is not the President’s fault. Trump
may also be benefiting from the popular emergency
economic relief legislation Democrats helped him
enact. “The country can unite behind its leaders in
a crisis if they feel like things are at least moving
in the right direction,” Ruffini says. “The summer’s
case spike seemed to break off that possibility for
the President. He’ll still have a chance to show that
things have turned a corner before November, but
time is running very short.”COViD-19 has ChangeD the tenor of the election
in unmistakable ways. Optimism has nosedived: the
share of people who believe the U.S. is on the right
track has declined 20 points since March. The pan-
demic has brought new urgency to issues like access to
health care, inequality and the social safety net, while
driving Trump’s preferred topics of immigration and
trade out of the picture. “The voters are fundamen-
tally the same, but the context of the 2020 election has
changed,” says UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck,
author of Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Cam-
paign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.