The Democratic Party SuperPAC Priorities USA seems to have struck gold with their new ad, "Exponential Threat," successfully showing how Trump has mismanaged the response tp the pandemic. After they put around $6 million behind running it in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Florida, Trump threatened to sue the stations running it. Priorities responded by putting another $600,000 into the buy, expanding it to Arizona.Guy Cecil, who is running the SuperPAC this cycle pointed out that "Trump spent weeks downplaying the threat of the coronavirus and his inaction left the country unprepared for this crisis. Even today, his lies are putting the health of millions of Americans at risk. The fact that Trump is going to such great lengths to keep the American people from hearing his own words adds to the urgency of communicating them far and wide. Trump doesn't want voters to know the truth. We will not be intimidated. We'll keep telling the truth and holding Donald Trump accountable."Trump flips out when anyone says he called the pandemic a hoax, claiming he only meant the Democrats' politicization of the pandemic was a hoax. Trump was at one of his hate rallies-- February 28 in North Charleston, South Carolina-- when he said the pandemic is a hoax. His exact words:
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes.One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that....So a number that nobody heard of that I heard of recently and I was shocked to hear it, 35,000 people on average die each year from the flu. Did anyone know that? 35,000. That’s a lot of people. It could go to 100,000, it could be 27,000, they say usually a minimum of 27, it goes up to 100,000 people a year who die, and so far we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it doesn’t mean we won’t, and we are totally prepared, it doesn’t mean we won’t. But think of it. You hear 35 and 40,000 people, and we’ve lost nobody, and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.
The reason why this is so important is because, American voters may not blame Trump for the side-effects of the pandemic, but will likely shred him if they believe he mishandled the response to it, which, if course, he did. The other day Rachel Bitecofer addressed just that in explaining the changes in her electoral model, which suggests that Trump will be defeated in November. She pointed out that "Now it is all but certain this fall’s general election will take place immersed in a serious [recession], with some early reports suggesting potential unemployment numbers, at least in the short term, well into the teens. To be sure, voters will likely see this recession as they saw the first term of Obama’s presidency, in context. No president can do much to avoid a total standstill of the global economy from an unprecedented virus. But Trump’s mismanagement of the underlying pandemic causing the economy to melt down will be judged by voters, and it’s already clear that the president’s missteps in the early days of the pandemic are exacerbating America’s economic woes."
[E]conomic fundamentals models under a recession will predict dismal electoral prospects for Trump. I assume these models have elements in them to prevent them from making forecasts akin to the Reagan/Carter map from 1980, which of course we will not see because the electorate of 1980, which was rich in liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and a Southern realignment hitting its stride is long gone.Now, the parties are largely ideologically homogenous and partisanship has evolved to become a social identity, an individual’s “ride or die,” which makes the prospect of red states breaking in favor of Biden seem unlikely, especially given the salience of white racial identity in contemporary Republican politics. In an America in which partisans are willing to inflict bodily harm on each other over politics, it seems unlikely that a mere recession, even an intense one, could move them off of their preferred presidential candidate in the ways it did prior to the polarized era, when the economic-fundamentals models, like the dinosaurs once did, ruled the Earth.
