Trump's gamble on reopening may not pay off

Follow Us Get the newsletter Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. The oddest thing in electoral politics over the past few weeks is what appears to be absolute, and unfounded, confidence among some Republican strategists that there's a trade-off between public health and the economy, and that what matters for President Donald Trump's re-election is the economy. This comes up all the time, but what got me going was a report that the Trump campaign is putting together a group of doctors to push a public message that simply reopening everything is the way to go. Almost every relevant expert who has commented publicly has said that the economy can't be repaired until the virus is at least somewhat under control. That includes, of course, the Trump administration's experts, who have put together detailed guidelines for how states can safely resume business activities. Perhaps those plans are too cautious. And surely a wide range of factors must be taken into consideration. Open too fast and you could risk outbreaks that force a second round of shutdowns; open too slowly and you might test people's patience with distancing measures.  But while tough choices remain about managing the pandemic over time, these aren't really choices between the economy and public health. And more to the point, the whole electoral conversation is wrong: There's no reason to think that reviving the economy by tolerating more lives lost — even if it were possible — would be the right electoral choice for the Trump campaign. Normally,  the economy has a powerful effect on elections. In fact, a deep recession during an election year would ordinarily have sealed Trump's fate already. The only question would be whether Republicans outside of his strongest supporters would stick with him so he could avoid a bloodbath. But this is no regular economic collapse. This one was deliberately caused as part of a fight against a pandemic. It's possible that voters, who normally blame or credit presidents for business-cycle fluctuations that they have little control over, might consider some economic pain necessary in these circumstances. No one knows; there's never been something like this in an election year. There's also never been anything like the pandemic itself in an election year. Which means we have no idea how voters will react. It's true that most state governors and foreign leaders got a significant boost to their approval ratings when the virus struck, while Trump received a minor and short-lived one. But no one knows what will happen if the death count is still rising quickly by Election Day. Nor is this something that campaigns or academic researchers can really study; people can't reliably predict their reactions to events in general, and certainly not to something beyond any of our experience.  I'll admit that I didn't see the rally effect coming. (Some people have erroneously said that a president's approval rating always spikes in the face of national tragedy, but in reality sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. It certainly did this time, so I was wrong to not see it coming.) Going forward, though, I'd guess that the crisis, unless something changes markedly, will begin to cause significant and increasing damage to Trump's popularity, enough so that it's quite possible that even if there was a way to crassly trade more deaths for a lower unemployment rate it would probably be a bad trade to make in purely electoral terms. That's only a guess, but what I can say with some confidence is that guessing is all anyone can do.  1. Robert Griffin and Mayesha Quasem at the Monkey Cage on who is opposing pandemic restrictions. 2. Matt Grossmann on anger and the 2020 election. 3. Sean Trende on getting the reporting right about Texas pandemic statistics. 4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Liam Denning on where the green jobs should be. 5. And Karen Tumulty on Trump's smear campaign. 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.   Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can't find anywhere else. Learn more.   You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. Unsubscribe | Bloomberg.com | Contact Us Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022