The Voters Trump Needs Most Right Now
As the two parties offer dueling interpretations of Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, new polling suggests that the pandemic’s ultimate political consequences may be determined by the substantial group of voters who accept the central premise of each side’s case.
The principal line of attack from Democrats, amplified in super-PAC ads already running across the battleground states, is that Trump downplayed the virus’s risk and fumbled the government’s response, especially as the threat grew from late January through early March. The principal defense offered by Republicans is that Trump has responded effectively since he declared a national emergency in mid-March.
Republicans expect that if voters conclude Trump avoided the worst, they will forgive any mistakes at the outset. “Voters are saying they don’t love that first phase, but a lot of people feel personally off guard too. So that’s why you see that generous ‘we were all caught off guard’ sentiment,” the GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson told me recently. The final verdict, she believes, will turn on whether “people perceive the administration as having been uniquely flat-footed, versus all of us being caught off guard by a lack of
