Donald Trump is a lucky devil. In almost half a century as a self-promoting real-estate developer, reality-television star, and political demagogue, he’s been through so many setbacks and difficulties that he may believe he’s invulnerable. Multiple bankruptcies, divorces, lawsuits, the “Access Hollywood” tape, the Stormy Daniels revelations, the Mueller investigation, impeachment, and contracting COVID-19 as an overweight man of seventy-four—he’s come through them all.
But with just eight days to go until November 3rd, Trump has run into something he cannot escape: an alarming third wave of the coronavirus pandemic. “Prolong the pandemic: that’s all I hear about now,” the clearly frustrated President said, at a campaign rally in Lumberton, North Carolina, on Saturday afternoon. “Turn on television. COVID, COVID. COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. A plane goes down. Five hundred people dead. They don’t talk about it. COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. By the way, on November 4th, you won’t hear about it anymore.”
The implication of Trump’s words was clear: the media is making up, or at least exaggerating, the spread of the coronavirus. That isn’t true. On Saturday, the number of new cases hit a record high: almost eighty-three thousand, according to the COVID Tracking Project. Nearly forty-two thousand people were hospitalized with COVID-19, and there were eight hundred and eighty-five new deaths. On a weekly basis, the number of new cases was up 20.6 per cent, the number of hospitalizations up 9.2 per cent, and the number of deaths up 15.8 per cent.
Over the weekend, Trump also repeated another untrue claim: the reason that case numbers are rising so fast is that testing has also increased rapidly. In the week before Trump’s speech on Saturday, total tests were up 3.8 per cent, according to the COVID Tracking Project. But the percentage increase in the number of new cases was more than five times the percentage increase in the number of tests—a clear indication that the virus is spreading much more rapidly than it was a few weeks ago.
In an interview with the BBC that was shown on Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Trump’s assessment that the United States is “rounding the corner” on the pandemic was wrong. “You can have opinions about what’s going on, but the data speak for themselves,” Fauci said. According to the New York Times, fifteen states saw a record number of cases last week—many of which are red states. (Here’s the full list: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.) Even the White House, which has already been hard hit by the coronavirus, seems to be experiencing another wave. Over the weekend, it emerged that at least five people connected with Vice-President Mike Pence, including his chief of staff, Marc Short, have tested positive over the past few days.
In an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” show, on Sunday, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, seemed to admit that the Trump Administration has largely given up on efforts to contain the virus’s spread. “We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows told Jake Tapper. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigations.” When Tapper followed up and asked Meadows why we aren’t going to get control of the pandemic, he replied, “Because it is a contagious virus, just like the flu.”
Also on Sunday, CBS News and the polling firm YouGov published new polls that show Joe Biden holding narrow leads over Trump in Florida and North Carolina, two states that the Trump campaign must win. Separately, a new survey of registered voters, conducted for the Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler showed Biden running two points ahead of Trump in Texas, a state that last voted for a Democratic Presidential candidate in 1976. “Texas remains a tossup because of the public’s attitudes toward President Trump,” Mark Owens, a political scientist who directed the poll, told the paper. Among independent voters, Trump’s approval rating is just thirty per cent, and his disapproval rating is fifty-seven per cent, the poll showed.
This Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler survey is just one of many, of course, and it could turn out to be wrong. The forecasting models from FiveThirtyEight and The Economist both suggest that Trump is likely to carry Texas. But, taking the most recent polling as a whole, there is little sign of the big shift in critical states that Trump needs, and there is plentiful evidence that the pandemic is hurting him.
Consider North Carolina, which voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but went Republican in the past two Presidential elections. In 2016, Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was largely based on seniors, whom he carried by twenty-three points—sixty per cent to thirty-seven per cent—according to exit polls. Fast forward to today, and the new CBS News/YouGov poll indicates that Biden is leading Trump by two points—fifty to forty-eight—among likely voters aged sixty-five and over. That’s a huge swing.
Though it’s hard to say how much of this shift can be attributed to any one factor, the pandemic certainly seems to be playing a role. According to the same survey, Trump is trailing Biden among North Carolina seniors by seven points on the question of who would best handle the coronavirus outbreak. In response to other questions from the pollsters, more than half of seniors said that Trump is describing the pandemic as better than it really is, and, of these people, more than three-quarters said that he’s doing it because he “wants to ignore a real problem.”
As Trump crisscrosses the country this week in an effort to rally his base and counteract Biden’s big advantage in paid media, he would love to change the subject—to Hunter Biden, the economy, immigration, anything but the pandemic. But nearly sixty million Americans have already voted, and the virus is still spreading rapidly. In a year defined by the coronavirus, it looks like the election may well be defined by it, too.
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