I know it was a different era, but … the government’s poor response to Hurricane Katrina cut Bush’s approval almost 10 points and helped swing the 2006 midterms to the Dems. Yet Katrina directly impacted a far smaller portion of the US population than COVID-19.
You don’t have to suffer directly from a catastrophe to recognize (and penalize) incompetence in handling it.
If there are 20 people whose deaths would devastate @suranyi , my guess is that there are a minimum of 100 people whose deaths would affect him/her. I mean, maybe you would only be affected by the death of someone in your immediate family or your best friend- but I don’t think it’s at all safe to assume that’s true for the average person when we are talking about a communicable disease. Because that’s part of what causes the effect on people too - that fact that it’s communicable.
No he isn’t. In 2016, the week after the RNC, Trump’s chances were rated by 538 as BETTER than they are as of today.
Given that I didn’t say that people are anti-military, the rest of your post is irrelevant.
But, to use another analogy.
Most of us don’t know anyone that lives(d) in Puerto Rico, which is one of the reasons that Trumps complete incompetence in dealing that still ongoing situation doesn’t hurt him much.
Again, that does not counter what I observed, I do remember that when WTC 9/11 took place Bush the lesser did keep good ratings for awhile because he did keep over 60% approval for months.
The incompetence from Trump shows up when he did not even managed this year to keep his just over 50% high approval for a month.
Then one has to notice the latest poll from ABC-Ipsos, sure one can make the point once again that ignoring the April anomaly trump’s polling has been about the same, but critically, while his handling of the Coronavirus crisis had a significant drop in his approval, the approval of that among Republicans has dropped now.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/views-trumps-handling-covid-all-time-low
How much more popular was Clinton, versus Biden, in polls from 2016?
As I understood it, your post said that people will vote out politicians who get Americans killed in war (or, at least that’s my read) even though the total number of people affected directly by those deaths would be very small, and you seemed to imply that there actually had been some sort of “voting out” along this lines.
I’m unaware of any such event and, as said, the finances seem to belie the idea without having to get into trying to take apart who was voted in or out at any given moment, and why that was so.
As far as I’m aware, very few soldiers are killed - with a lower fatality rate even during the height of the Iraq Surge - than if those same young men had been in the USA. It is, indeed, small. And, so far as I’m aware, there’s no reason to think that anyone was ever voted out of office because of their support for utilizing the military as a military.
But you are free to show some sort of data, to the contrary, if you believe that your read of the situation is matched in reality. As said, it doesn’t match any numbers that I’m aware of and, probably, runs counter to them.
You cannot possibly be this dense. I don’t even know how to respond. It’s like saying 9/11 wasn’t a political issue because only 3k people died. Oh yeah, maybe 20k had close connections… it’s really not that many.
COVID affects basically 100% of the population. Not being able to eat out/visit friends/see a movie/live events/sports/etc, homeschooling children, the inconvenience of wearing a mask. To reduce it to only people that know someone that directly died is unbelievably myopic unless you have a condition.
My expectation would be that people were initially scared, genuinely concerned for their own safety and the safety of others, and willing to approve almost anything and everything to make sure that the country was safe.
And that, then, they got over it at some point. They noticed how no one was actually being murdered by terrorists, stopped fearing it, and moved on with life.
Donald Trump, for example, can be quoted as saying that the Saudis financed 9/11. He’s currently being investigated by Congress for illegally pushing through arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
I don’t see many people raising too much of a fuss that he’s decided to arm the people who he directly blames for those 3k American deaths. And I doubt that you would get much traction trying to point it out to Southerners.
What people say and people believe in their hearts are different things. Everyone will tell you that 9/11 is important and sacrosanct. I don’t have data from 2001 as readily available, but Trump can easily be torn apart over the subject - the Saudis, his claims to have lost hundreds of friends, etc. And that’s all a non-issue as best I can tell, to the majority of the public.
If you can prove otherwise, through data, then I will welcome it.
Of course it counters what you stated.
Trump simply did NOT get very favorable approval numbers when he “appeared to confront the pandemic”. He was a bit less unfavorable than he had been, but compared to what historically has been the rally round together united against the threat, podunk. He has also never really plummeted. Against Biden since mid March it has been Biden up 8 +/- 2 pretty consistently (3/20 up 6.8, now up 7). Approval same dates 43.2 then now 43.4.
You actually said “Never”, in reality I was talking about him going over 50% approval just about when the pandemic lockdown started and finally he was doing something. He had not reached that before, as I noted if he had become “presidential” as a lot of the mainstream media expected forever he would IMHO maintained a lot of that bounce for months. But as usual, the leopard can not change his spots.
Still, the latest polling did show that even among Republicans his support did fell because of how bad he is handling the pandemic.
You must mean a single poll or something. The tracker is never. Not even 46 since the first days after election.
Latest polling is mid to top of his typical narrow range. Not near his bottom. Not collapsing.
Now maybe there’s some information on enthusiasm in the cross tabs but by the crude number judging his pandemic response as horrible is not impacting his overall approval much.
I really did goof there 
, I was actually looking at the disapproval ratings, they had dropped to 50%, not the same I grant you, but Trump won in 2016 with those disapproval numbers, still that disapproval increased after what I noticed, the usual incompetency from Trump showed up.
That bit of the Republicans giving Trump less support now on his Corinavirus responce still stands.
And look at the Iran hostage crisis in 1980. Most Americans had never met any of the fifty-two people who were being held hostage so it had no effect on the election.
Exactly. The medical crisis isn’t what is hurting Trump. What’s hurting him if his failure to respond to the crisis.
People want a President who can lead the country in a crisis. What we have seen is that Trump can’t do that.
Once people start thinking about the possibility of Trump still being in office if we have another serious crisis in the next four years, they will vote against him.
The thread title may not be that far off. If the CDC rolls out the vaccine before the election, as they now say they’ll do, how will that affect voting?
You seem to forget that Fox and the conservative propaganda stream have allowed people to believe in all kinds of alternate realities. Most Trumpsters I know think he’s done a bang-up job of handling COVID. Argue that he wasted valuable time calling it a hoax and insisting everything was fine, just fine, and they’ll present you with a whole different timeline, one in which Trump immediately stopped people entering the US from China and, they insist, was called a racist for it.
Sure, the Trumpsters are a lost cause.
But the majority of people in this country aren’t stupid enough to be a Trumpster. You can lie to them about things like the budget deficit or climate change. But they can look out the window and see the reality of Covid19.
Indeed, on the recent poll that I linked, some Republicans have finally found a reason to drop a bit of their support of Trump. Related to the Thread, their approval of Trump’s handling the pandemic was hovering around 88% for awhile. Recently the approval dropped to 78%. Still, very sickening levels of support among Republicans, but significantly enough to figure out that there are enough opposed to Trump (enough Republicans too) that will make a difference in the election.
But people have to understand it that way. If they think of our current situation as just ineffable, and utterly random, it won’t play out like that. They will think, “well, the bad thing happened so we are safe”. They will think it’s a crazy coincidence this happened on Trumps watch.
Biden’s campaign has to make it crystal clear that it didn’t have to be like this, and that it could be worse. That every president has crises to deal with, and with good leadership, they don’t develop into their own era defining catastrophe.
I have no doubt the Biden campaign and the Lincoln Project will make this case to the voters.