The Pandemic Hasn’t Changed Voters’ Minds About Trump

For all the focus on the gender gap, the diploma divide over Donald Trump is looming as an even greater factor in the 2020 presidential race—just as it was in 2016.

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, women generally express more financial strain and more concern about returning to their normal routines than men do. And yet a wide array of recent polls shows that, especially among white voters, education remains the most important dividing line in reaction to Trump’s handling of the crisis.

That pattern, in turn, signals that most voters are basing their assessments of Trump’s performance less on their actual daily experiences and more on their preexisting viewpoints about his tumultuous and norm-shattering presidency. The biggest exception to that dynamic is older Americans, including older white voters, who polls suggest have clearly cooled on Trump as he and other Republicans have signaled—or flat out declared—that more deaths among seniors might be an acceptable price for reopening the economy.

But mostly, the intense pressure of the pandemic appears to be fortifying, rather than fracturing, the long-standing divisions in the electorate that Trump has already widened since 2016, according to a wide range of previously unpublished polling data.