Last time I checked (I just looked out the window) Australia was also an island country that even in good times is careful who they allow to visit.
So concur with you about the poor comparison, but apparently there are some out there who consider Oz is lead by a Trump-lite figure.
You are probably right, but if instead of the state suffering 33k COVID deaths and counting, had Trump turned the federal spigot on full and provided the healthcare support to avert that crisis do you think there was no chance New Yorkers might have been appreciative on that point alone?
I’m sure they would have, and Trump would have lost New York by a smaller margin than normal, but…partisan lines are partisan lines. You’d have to have something like 500,000 New York Democrats who loathe Trump’s tweets, lies, corruption, scandals, etc. think, “Well, this guy did well on the pandemic, so I’ll vote for him even though this means continuing his anti-abortion, anti-LGBT, anti-Hispanic, anti-Muslim agenda”. That would just be too much.
Plus, they could always rationalize a (D) vote by saying that Hillary or Biden would have handled the pandemic just as well or perhaps even better anyway (which perhaps they indeed would have.)
I generally agree with the OP. Prior to the pandemic, I think Trump was doing fairly well, popularity-wise: remember the State of the Union address, where Pelosi ripped-up her copy? The Democrats, like it or not, had just gotten their butts kicked with the impeachment, and people were still bitter about the Kavanaugh debacle, which also made the Democrats look bad. As pointed-out, without the pandemic, Trump’s lie machine would have kept trucking along all summer without the distractions of ventilators, PPE, and body counts. But the pandemic sucked all the air out of the room, and Trump’s own ineptitude and malfeasance related to the response made a difference for a lot of people. I agree Biden should have made a more-to-the-point argument linking the botched pandemic response to the economy, but what little Biden did seems to have been enough.
Fair enough.
I was thinking of something like a scenario that somebody goes to Nate Silver in June with a crystal ball saying that Trump would win 72 million votes and the since dethroned prince of polling responding with incredulity “You mean Trump is re-elected in a landslide?”
The U.S. borders Canada and Mexico. I haven’t read anything to suggest these two countries were a significant source of Covid for the U.S. I have read China and Europe were the primary sources for the U.S. So if the U.S. had immediately shut down foreign travel and did the lockdowns, test and trace, etc like New Zealand did the U.S. could have been as successful.
And note the the U.S. is much more self-sufficient than New Zealand is.
I also think Trump would have won re-election. And not just because of so many rednecks but because of the Democratic strategy of Identity politics.
I think most of you are misreading the OP to be something like, “If the election had been a year ago, would Trump have won?” or “If nothing unusual happened in 2020, would Trump have won?”
It is my opinion that if the pandemic didn’t happen, then some OTHER thing would have been getting the election-year headlines. And Trump would have handled it the same narcissistic way that he handled everything else. Really, I don’t think his personality was any different in 2020 than in 2019 or 2018.
But the pandemic was an unusual issue in that it was so non-political, and so simple that even many of Trump supporters questioned his handling of it. It did an extremely good job of showing the country what kind of person he is. Other issues would not have illustrated this so clearly, and would have led to fewer defections from the Trump camp, allowing him to win.