| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. It's worth checking in again on how public opinion seems to be responding to President Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Once again, I'm sorry to talk about electoral politics during a disaster. But politics remains extremely important, and you can be sure that Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden and all other national politicians are well aware of the upcoming elections in November. As they should be! That's part of their job. The good news? For Trump, the system mainly gives him healthy incentives: Whatever he does to minimize the physical and economic damage that the virus causes should, all else equal, help him get re-elected. So what do we know so far? Trump has in fact received a bit of rally-around-the-flag support, with his approval numbers reaching a new post-honeymoon high. He's retained his peak for several days now. Granted, it's not exactly impressive, with about 46% approving of him and about 50% disapproving. The good news for Trump is that if there's a hard ceiling on his support, it's at least a bit higher than we previously knew, and perhaps high enough to enable him to get narrowly re-elected. The bad news is that if this is the best he can do, everything will have to go perfectly for him in November. Of course, we don't know whether this is as good as it gets for Trump. After all, by the time you read this, he might've gotten a couple of good polls and improved over where he appears to be now. And it's possible that the polling averages understate (or overstate) his actual popularity. One more thing: I've seen some pundits assuming that major crises always produce rally effects for the president's approval rating, but that's not correct; sometimes there's an immediate drop in approval. Comparing Trump's current improvement to the biggest historical rallies (such as George W. Bush's after the Sept. 11 attacks or Jimmy Carter's after the hostages were taken in Iran) isn't fair to Trump. Improvement is improvement. That said, the president shouldn't be too happy with the polling so far. The most obvious reason is that while his rating has risen by three or four percentage points, it appears that most governors are getting much more substantial bounces for handling the pandemic. Another is that so far, Trump's modest improvement doesn't seem to be translating into better results in head-to-head polling against Biden, as John Sides and Robert Griffin explain. There are also some specific questions that suggest the public might not be patient with the president if bad news continues. And everyone, the president included, expects quite a lot of bad news over the next few weeks. Beyond that is only guesswork. No one knows the public-opinion effects of shutting down the nation's economy, because it hasn't happened before. The same goes for an epidemic on the scale we're likely to see. We do know something about the effects of economic changes: Presidents get blamed for hard times. But we don't know whether a deliberately induced shutdown intended to save lives will have normal effects. If I had to guess, I'd say that Trump's approval rating will survive the pandemic (even though it probably shouldn't) but that he'll be severely punished for a lingering economic slump (even if he handles it well). Those are just guesses, though. I can't emphasize strongly enough that we simply don't have any basis for predicting how voters will respond to what's about to take place. All of which means that this year's presidential election is far more unpredictable than most. 1. Tyler Reny and Matt Barreto at the Monkey Cage on bigotry and the coronavirus. 2. Calvin TerBeek at A House Divided on the latest from the conservative legal movement. 3. Adam Serwer on where the dysfunction in U.S. politics can be found. 4. Elaine Godfrey on why it's hard to know exactly how many deaths are caused by the pandemic. 5. And Julian Sanchez on fixing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
Post a Comment