| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. The 2020 presidential election is now less than six months away. We're close enough that head-to-head polling matchups are no longer totally meaningless. But I still suspect that president's approval rating is a better predictor. And the news for Donald Trump is not good. I suppose one reason for Trump to be optimistic is that after a month in which tens of thousands of Americans died from the coronavirus pandemic and millions more were added to the unemployment rolls, his approval numbers are still a bit better than usual: The 538 polling average estimate has him at 43.2% approval and 51.3% disapproval. But that's it for the good news. Trump's numbers are up a bit from last week, but the mild pandemic rally that brought him to his best post-honeymoon rating last month is gone. That tiny rally remains remarkable. The president's reaction to the virus consistently polls worse than governors in their states and his boost was much smaller than that for most foreign leaders. In fact, even Congress, according to a Monmouth poll out Tuesday, got about a 10 percentage-point bounce during the crisis. Not Trump. (To be clear: His approval rating is still better than Congress's, but Congress is never popular, so that's not an accomplishment to brag about.) Trump's current number ranks seventh out of the polling-era presidents through 1,202 days. What's more telling is that there are clear historical patterns for presidents seeking a second term. Trump's net approval is -8.1 (that is, 43.2 approval minus 51.3 disapproval). The three recent presidents who were easily re-elected had solid positive net approval at this point: Richard Nixon at +17.7, Bill Clinton at +16.1 and Ronald Reagan at +15.3. The two most recent presidents both won somewhat narrowly; at this point, Barack Obama was at +1.7 and George W. Bush at -0.3. And then there were the two most recent losers. George H.W. Bush had fallen from a then-record approval down to -6.8. Jimmy Carter was only at -2.7, but that was probably just a quirk of the data, since he had recently been at -10 and would soon sink even further underwater. Both Carter and the first Bush dipped lower by Election Day; the three easy winners all improved further. That suggests there's still time for Trump to either rise to a level where he could win re-election — or to plunge low enough for former Vice President Joe Biden to win something around 400 electoral votes. The truth is that if voters react to the current recession the way they typically do in an election year, Trump will lose, and lose badly. It's quite possible he was sunk as soon as the virus became a big enough threat that people cut back on normal activities, even before government-imposed restrictions. To have any chance, Trump needs for people to blame the recession on the pandemic while also not blaming the president for how he handled it. And that's without getting into meat shortages and other potential bad news, given that voters have been known to blame politicians for such things even when it's clearly not their fault, and in this instance it will be easy to make the case (accurately or not) that Trump is responsible. As I've said before, the circumstances this year are unusual enough that we should be cautious with any predictions. But unless there are signs of a significant economic recovery, which isn't likely unless the pandemic recedes, it's hard to picture Trump's situation improving and easy to imagine it deteriorating to the point where he's no longer competitive. 1. Matthew Green at Mischiefs of Faction with a relatively optimistic read of the coronavirus and threats to democracy. 2. Amy S. Patterson and Emmanuel Balogun at the Monkey Cage on the World Health Organization and U.S. interests in Africa. 3. Perry Bacon Jr. on anti-Trump conservatives in the Democratic Party. 4. Jonathan Chait on Trump's economic-recovery proposals. The point, of course, is that nothing Trump is pushing has anything to do with the current situation; it's mostly standard-issue Republican positions plus a few things that Trump particularly likes. And he hasn't bothered to actually draw up a real proposal. 5. Emily Bazelon on holding elections during the pandemic. 6. And you may not be surprised to learn that Trump's boasts about his baseball career turn out to be not at all true. The best part for me was that he claimed to have attended a professional tryout with Willie McCovey … except that the late, great Hall of Famer made his famous major league debut a month after Trump's 13th birthday and had been signed to a pro contract when Trump was nine, so I don't think so. 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. | 
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