Can Republicans Win Back Congress Next Year by Running Against "Cancel Culture"? Sure They Can

There's a popular view of the last few weeks of American politics that goes something like this: Under Joe Biden's leadership, the Democratic Party is not only easing the current national crisis by handing out $1400 checks and distributing COVID vaccines to American citizens, but has also already enacted some of the most ambitious liberal policy change since the Great Society, making Biden a potentially transformational president after just two months in office. And what are Republicans doing while all this historical achievement is going on? Ranting and raving about "cancel culture."

This account isn't necessarily wrong as a simple description of recent events, though it's really too soon to evaluate the long-term importance of a American Rescue Plan Act that has been law for less than a week. As I recently remarked to Jeff Stein of the Washington Post, the lack of a sustained conservative attack on the bill eased the political pressure on moderate Democratic members of Congress who might otherwise have worried about its $1.9 trillion cost: "the case against Democrats [right now] is being made on Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, not the debt." Leading conservative media voices and prominent Republican politicians alike have rallied to the defense of these pop-culture figures and other symbols of traditional Americana supposedly in danger of permanent suppression by the censorious left; Rep. Jim Jordan argued last month that "cancel culture . . . is the number one issue for the country to address today."

But the cancel-culture preoccupation isn't necessarily a mistake for Republicans—at least if their main objective is electoral success, not substantive influence. Polls have consistently shown that Biden's COVID response efforts gain wider popular approval than any other major policy or presidential quality. Meanwhile, as Harry Enten of CNN recently pointed out, the assertion that political correctness has "gone too far" receives broader agreement from the American public than the Republican Party's positions on many other political issues. Rather than trying to convince voters that legislation containing immediate four-figure cash payments for everyone in their family is actually a bad idea, it's strategically easier to simply move the partisan battle to more favorable terrain.

Democrats are hoping that the Republican politicians who opposed the Rescue Plan will be punished at the polls next year. But history suggests that voting in favor of an unpopular bill is more likely to inspire a backlash than voting against a popular bill—especially one that passed anyway. Members of congressional majorities often hope to be rewarded by the public for enacting the policies they like, but anger tends to be a much stronger political motivator than gratitude. And the margins of control in the House and Senate are so narrow that even a mostly content electorate that was not particularly outraged by the supposed extermination of certain favorite childhood possessions could still easily hand power back to the GOP in 2022.

The Republican pivot to "cancel culture" outrage may not matter much for the party's immediate electoral fortunes, and might even be a better strategic option for a midterm message than the alternatives. But it's much more noteworthy as a marker of what GOP sees itself as standing for these days. Since Obama's second term, Republicans have increasingly retreated from offering specific alternatives to Democratic domestic policies, and have invested much more energy in emphasizing symbolic cultural differences between the left and the right. Whether or not this shift influences the outcome of any particular election, it has very significant implications for the manner in which both parties govern when it is their turn to lead the country.

An Elegy for Old-Fashioned Political Campaigns in the COVID Age

The traditional campaign trail has become one of the political casualties of the COVID-19 epidemic. Joe Biden ceased holding large public events after he became the de facto Democratic nominee the week after Super Tuesday, just as the virus began its nationwide spread, and the Trump campaign has retreated to a similar policy after its comeback rally in Tulsa last month proved to be an over-hyped and under-attended disappointment. Even the president's most dedicated supporters turned out to be less enthusiastic about in-person electioneering in the midst of an uncontrolled national outbreak of disease.

It's become obvious this year how much of the standard press coverage of presidential campaigns is structured around the idea of a daily "top story" generated by the assignment of reporters and camera crews to follow the candidates around the country, ready to leap on anything that appears novel or unscripted amidst the otherwise repetitive cycle of stump speeches, rope lines, factory visits, and diner drop-ins. Most personal accounts of presidential elections written by candidates or journalists are blurry, weary travelogues that grudgingly acknowledge the democratic virtue of in-person politicking before returning to complaints about endless drudgery, exhaustion, and logistical snags.

But take away all that hopscotching from one battleground state to the next, and it's easy to wonder whether there really is a campaign at all. Joe Biden is continuing to hold virtual events and deliver policy speeches, but they simply don't seem as important—and certainly don't receive as much coverage—without big, cheering crowds and a chartered jet to schlep around the entourage. And Donald Trump's inability to hold his signature raucous rallies has helped to erase the line between presidential campaigning and presidential governing, as his COVID briefings and other White House events have come to serve as substitutes. Even if the virtual programs for the national conventions end up being snazzy productions, they will likely receive less attention than usual this year merely because they won't seem as momentous to the press or public as the in-person events of years past.

Might the lack of a traditional campaign trail affect the outcome of the election? Republicans are starting to worry that the result in November will wind up being a simple popular referendum on an increasingly unpopular admininistration—and not just in the presidential vote, but in congressional and down-ballot races as well. The Washington Post recently reported that many electorally vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents are challenging their opponents to an extensive series of debates with the hope that less-tested candidates will have a greater chance of screwing up in public, since the reduction of normal campaign events has also curtailed the usual practice of shadowing the opposing candidate with a "tracker" armed with a video camera to capture footage of any mistake. Meanwhile, Democrats have become concerned that their efforts to register new voters and mobilize sporadic participants will suffer from the relative lack of traditional grassroots activity this year.

Of course, the election was likely to serve as a referendum on Trump even before the onset of COVID, and the primary campaign arsenal of congressional candidates—paid advertising—remains unaffected by the current crisis. Interested would-be voters who have postponed registration so far may start to register in greater numbers as the election starts to approach, and the atmosphere of national crisis could also boost participation independent of organized get-out-the-vote initiatives. So the reduction of in-person campaigning this year may well have little effect on the outcome of the 2020 elections.

But the lack of so many familiar trappings of American political culture, from hand-shaking and small talk at midwestern state fairs and ice cream shops to the quadrennial spectacles of the national conventions, is still something worth mourning in our moment of disruption and isolation. Sure, a lot of this activity was formally obsolete and (for candidates, staff, and journalists) sometimes annoyingly inconvenient. But why should political campaigns necessarily be conducted for the maximum comfort or entertainment of their professional participants? Like so many other social rituals, these practices have taken on a meaning of their own as symbols of participatory democracy, and their absence—hopefully a temporary one—should rightfully be lamented as a small part of all that has been lost in this very sad year.

Why COVID Was Never Going to Produce National Unity

The presidency of Donald Trump is often treated as if it represents a dramatic new development in American politics, but it's likely that future generations looking back on this time in history will be somewhat surprised, or even amused, by the prevalence of such a view. In many ways, Trump is more interesting, or important, as a fulfillment of existing trends reaching back decades into the past than he is as an innovator in his own right. In retrospect, a Trump-like figure rising to power within the Republican Party can, and probably will, be seen as a completely natural development.

The current historical moment is merely the point at which the barrier previously separating the increasingly-dominant media wing of the American conservative movement from its traditional officeholding wing suffered a serious structural buckle, catapulting many of the media types—with their distinctive preoccupations, motivations, and rhetorical styles—into positions of governing power. Put another way, the Trump administration is more or less a real-life simulation of what would have happened if Rush Limbaugh had been elected president. Journalists and attentive citizens often gasp at this or that example of "unprecedented" Trumpian behavior and marvel that they can't picture Barack Obama—or George W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan—ever saying or doing such a thing. But if the question were instead "can you imagine a President Limbaugh saying or doing that?" the answer is nearly always yes.

Many observers have expressed amazement at how quickly the nationwide public health crisis of COVID-19, itself not inherently an ideological or divisive issue, has evolved to conform to the outline of familiar culture-war conflicts. But to the media outlets that now exercise substantial influence over the national Republican Party, culture war is what politics is all about. In the world that they construct for their audiences, conservatism is in the position of defending America itself against ceaseless attack from Democratic politicians, liberal interests, and a mainstream news media all bent on its destruction or catastrophic transformation. In this constant state of emergency, there is little room to prize non-ideological values such as governing competence or policy expertise, and any form of compromise with the political opposition is tantamount to capitulation.

Even during periods of Republican rule, the content of conservative media programming focuses more on criticizing Democrats and the non-conservative media than on celebrating conservative electoral or governing successes. An emergence of national unity, with the leaders and members of both parties agreeing to implement public policies developed by non-partisan experts to address a widespread threat to the well-being of all citizens, wouldn't just undercut the arguments that liberals are wrong about everything and that government power cannot be leveraged productively for universal benefit. It's even worse than that: what would the conservative media talk about every day?

Trump's own instincts lie in the same direction. Unlike previous leaders of both parties, he ran for the presidency not by vowing to bring the country together but instead by promising constant conflict with an array of perceived enemies inside as well as outside its borders. Intermittent expectations that Trump might seek to "rise above" mere political warfare were thus unrealistic: in his view, the warfare is the whole point. The idea of approaching the current crisis with a bipartisan spirit is as incomprehensible to him as it would be to any Fox News host, and both Fox and the White House have quickly reverted to their common comfort zone of the partisan firing range: questioning the need for social distancing restrictions and even the severity of the disease itself while accusing Democrats, journalists, and scientists of using the crisis as a cover to sabotage the president.

But an important difference remains between officeholding conservatives and media figures: talking heads don't need to win over a plurality of eyeballs to build long and successful careers, but politicians can only stay in power by attracting more votes, whether popular or electoral, than the other side. The all-culture-war-all-the-time attitude is more reliable as a means of building a loyal audience in a splintered media marketplace than as a national campaign strategy. Trump is openly envious of the governors who have received a post-COVID boost in personal approval ratings that has eluded him, but the facts-first, inclusive governing approach that citizens have rewarded across party lines at the state and local level is simply not in his nature to adopt regardless of its potential electoral benefits.

Trump's current situation is reminiscent of the time that ESPN hired Rush Limbaugh to provide commentary on its highly-rated "NFL Countdown" pregame show. Limbaugh's tenure only lasted about a month, ending abruptly after he used his new platform to argue that mainstream sports media analysts were reluctant to criticize the performance of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb because McNabb was black. Limbaugh, a lifelong sports fan, undoubtedly recognized what a valuable opportunity he was being provided, and that his new bosses would be expecting him to justify their controversial decision to bring him aboard by showing that he was capable of being more than an incendiary political warrior. But, like Trump, Limbaugh just couldn't help himself once the camera was pointed at him. His life’s purpose is to say these things, and these are the only kind of things he knows how to say.

The Weakest Modern Presidency Faces a Pandemic From the Couch

For three years now, political scientists Jonathan Bernstein and Matt Glassman have been arguing that Donald Trump is a historically weak president—probably the weakest of the modern (post-FDR) presidents. This is a contrarian view in some respects. Trump dominates the day-to-day media coverage of politics like no other figure in memory, and even many of his harshest critics often describe him as ruthlessly wielding the power of his office.

But I suspect that this argument will become more popular over time, especially once Trump departs the presidency and is no longer the constant obsession of the political world. Even prior to the current emergency, Trump had rarely been invested in the substantive responsibilities of his office and had never been able to attract sustained popular support for himself or his policies. He has presided over an executive branch whose administrative and political capacity has been constrained by mismanagement, infighting, and a cast of substandard subordinates serving alongside an array of temporary appointees and outright vacancies. While other presidents learned on the job from early mistakes, Trump has seemed incapable of significant growth or adaptation.

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed this weakness to public view like no previous event. Other than signing economic aid legislation for citizens and businesses—initiatives that were chiefly negotiated by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and congressional Democrats with little personal involvement by the president—Trump does not appear to be leading an ambitious national response to the epidemic. Governors and other state officials complain of insufficient federal assistance (and even active federal interference). According to recent reporting, Trump is unengaged with the substance of his administration's COVID mitigation efforts: his discursive appearances at task force meetings reveal a limited understanding of relevant subjects when he attends at all, and he spends much of the workday watching cable television.

Trump has angrily disputed these accounts, suggesting that he may be the hardest-working president in history. But the amount of time that he has visibly devoted to complaining on Twitter or holding extended press briefings is evidence enough of where his attention has been directed. Though they were initially assumed to be politically beneficial, the president's daily briefings have only turned out to advertise his limitations, impressing nobody who wasn't already a supporter. It's thus understandable that Trump's post-COVID bump in job approval was both comparatively modest and unusually short-lived.

Unlike the governors and mayors who are earning public support across party lines for their handling of the crisis, Trump seems incapable of understanding that projecting strength requires exhibiting intellectual command of the facts and toning down personal grievances. Rather than learning from experience, he repeats the same mistakes over and over: claiming that the virus will "just go away," touting unproven or nonsensical remedies, and making quickly-falsified predictions about how long the crisis will continue or how many Americans will die. And the president has repeatedly shifted responsibility for solving the problem from himself to state and local officials—quite a departure from the "I alone can fix it" rhetoric of the 2016 campaign.

The fundamental passivity of the president's response to COVID-19 is especially instructive given his normal preoccupation with projecting executive decisiveness, populist sympathies, and Type-A swagger. Trump's desire to comport to the ultimate "strong leader" archetype is indeed powerful, but not so powerful that it can overcome a limited interest in information-gathering, an inability to think strategically over the long term, a lack of mental focus on any subject other than himself, and a general absence of committed energy for the tasks of governing.

All of these traits were visible before COVID came along. But now the demands on this presidency have grown stronger while the president looks less and less comfortable in the job, unable even to mimic the seriousness of purpose that other elected officials have marshaled in the moment. He seems to be hoping that he will wake up one day and the virus will simply be gone—via miracle cure or act of providence—without the need for any dedication or sacrifice on his part. That's admittedly a relatable wish, but it's not how a strong president would act.

Solving the COVID Crisis Requires Bipartisanship, But the Modern GOP Isn't Built for It

American politics is famously polarized these days, but it's hard to envision any solution to the COVID pandemic and associated economic crisis that doesn't require a lot of bipartisan agreement. Democratic and Republican officeholders need to cooperate in order to enact economic aid legislation and other measures designed to ameliorate the effects of the outbreak. Supporters of both parties need to respect the authority of state and local officials to impose restrictions on public gatherings in order to slow the spread of the virus. And the future expiration of these stay-at-home orders will not produce an economic rebound unless Democrats as well as Republicans feel safe enough to resume their normal consumption activities.

As my political science colleague Frances Lee points out in Insecure Majorities, her excellent book on the modern Congress, breakdowns in bipartisanship often benefit the party out of power, by denying the ruling side the policy achievements and broad popular legitimacy that it would gain from productive cooperation. Tamping down partisan divisions in order to focus on fighting the virus and helping those affected by the deteriorating economy thus especially serves the interest of the Republican Party, the current holder of the presidency. November's election will serve as an unavoidable referendum on President Trump, and citizens' perceptions of his performance in handling the COVID crisis will not only influence the outcome of the presidential race but will extend to congressional and even state-level contests as well.

Under the current circumstances, then, we might expect an incumbent president to pursue a strategy of staying above the partisan fray, reassuring Americans of all political preferences that he was committed to protecting both their health and their wealth from the current threats while finding some common ground with the leaders of the opposition. But Trump's instincts—especially in moments of potential vulnerability—compel him to attack his perceived enemies and ratchet up the general level of conflict. He has even suggested at times that he will condition federal aid to states and localities on the amount of deference he receives from their elected officials. There has been no apparent attempt by his administration to build credibility with the public outside the 45 percent or so of Americans who already like and trust the president.

Trump's personality is what it is. But his combative style is shared by many of his partisan allies. Other major elements of the Republican party network, such as conservative interest groups and the conservative media universe, are increasingly promoting Trump's position that the threat of the coronavirus is exaggerated and that prevailing social distancing restrictions are excessive. Familiar Republican targets—not only Democratic politicians but also scientific experts and the mainstream media—are under fresh attack from an American right that has become suddenly anxious about the president's chances of re-election during conditions of national economic catastrophe.

The contemporary Republican Party has been built to wage ideological and partisan conflict more than to manage the government or solve specific social problems. So perhaps it shouldn't be shocking that an array of subjects, from what medical treatment might help COVID patients to how important it is to take measures protecting the lives of the elderly, have been drawn into the perpetual political wars. But leading conservative figures like Trump, Sean Hannity, and the Heritage Foundation will find it much easier to persuade existing supporters to take their side in a fight with "liberal" scientists, journalists, and public safety authorities than to win over the American public as a whole.

Republicans need a party-wide reset of priorities. There has seldom been a time in recent political history when daily partisan point-scoring has been rendered more irrelevant. The general election is far enough away that good policy is good politics: the best way for the ruling party to serve its own electoral interests is to work as hard as possible over the next seven months to render COVID manageable and prevent economic freefall. The widespread public confidence that will be necessary for "normal life" to resume simply can't be jawboned back into existence via daily press conferences, radio broadcasts, or Fox News monologues. If Republicans lose the battle with the coronavirus, they won't have much of a chance to win the fight against liberalism.

Time Passes Slowly Under COVID—So the Political World Should Adjust Accordingly

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began to affect daily life in the United States, it has distorted the nation's collective sense of time. Many people have observed in the last few days how long the month of March 2020 seemed to last; the events of its first week, such as Joe Biden's electoral success on Super Tuesday and the withdrawals of Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren, now seem to have occurred in a long-distant era. This makes psychological sense: the world has fundamentally changed, that change is highly unpleasant and anxiety-provoking (if time flies when we're having fun, it crawls when we're miserable), and the measures imposed to control the spread of the virus confine most of the population to a limited set of spaces, activities, and companions.

One of the many unfortunate consequences of this development is its exacerbation of the American political class's existing preoccupation with immediate daily or even hourly developments at the expense of long-term perspective. The disinclination to think beyond the moment at hand has been a signature characteristic of the Trump presidency from its first day of existence, and the serious risks and dangers that accompany this aversion to planning and foresight have become excruciatingly obvious in the current crisis. Repeatedly dismissing the coronavirus as a non-threat or even non-issue in the early weeks of the pandemic may have fleetingly avoided spooking the press, the public, or the markets, but in retrospect it seems like a tragic error in both policy and political terms.

Trump's habit of governing with eyes fixed on the daily rhythms and pet subjects of television news coverage is commonly framed as an indictment of him, though it's equally an indictment of television news coverage. And social media, though it can do a better job of disseminating information than the average cable talking head-fest, operates with an even greater degree of transience. The emergence of the COVID-19 epidemic has only magnified this moment-to-moment mentality.

Rather than directing all of its energies towards developing and implementing an aggressive federal policy response, the White House has succumbed to the temptation to treat the pandemic as a public relations problem that needs a public relations solution (to paraphrase a previous president mischaracterizing his own presidency-defining crisis). Its daily press conferences are organized less to provide useful facts to the public than to allow Trump to engage in personal credit-claiming and subordinates or allies to bestow additional credit on him. Inevitably, these events attract considerable media attention, which just as inevitably provokes frustrated liberals to blast journalists for providing Trump positive publicity and allowing him to spread misinformation—even as Trump himself uses the platform to lob attacks at disfavored reporters. Meanwhile, in a particularly silly testament to the growing political time warp now in effect, a few days spent out of public view turned out to be long enough for a coalition of journalists, Republicans, and Bernie Sanders supporters to treat Joe Biden as if he had virtually forfeited the 2020 election.

The Trump administration, its opponents on the left, and its targets in the media have become locked in a cycle of perpetual mutual obsession that has not proven healthy for anyone concerned. Despite their many conflicts, all of these actors share the view that there's usually nothing more important than today's news. But the coronavirus does not abide by the same rules of time. It may have seemed to arrive quickly, but it is not likely to depart quickly. And so it renders the day-to-day preoccupations of the political world even more peripheral than usual.

In general, the rhetoric of political leaders, the testimony of scientific experts, and the coverage of media sources have done an increasingly effective job of persuading citizens of the potentially catastrophic effects of COVID-19 on both public health and the national economy. But there has been less open acknowledgement of the sheer length of time that it may take for daily life to approach relative normality. Trump, of course, went so far as to suggest last week that public institutions could reopen by Easter, for which he received considerable criticism before retreating from this timeline in recent days.

But even the University of Washington's frequently-cited projections of future infection and mortality frequencies, as foreboding as they may be in forecasting imminent emergency in much of the country, take on a reassuring bell-curved shape with the patient caseload declining rapidly in May, reaching minimal levels by mid-summer. However, these estimates assume the indefinite maintenance of maximal social distancing practices. It's likely that crisis conditions will continue until a vaccine or major treatment breakthrough arrives, and rules governing access to public spaces will need to reflect the ongoing presence of the threat. How can anything close to normal life resume before the virus is eradicated or the effects of infection become manageable?

For those who have found the last two or three weeks to be slowly-paced, the prospect of months or even years of continued restrictions—as casualties mount and the economy deteriorates—may seem hard to contemplate. But that's why the attention of politicians, journalists, and citizens alike should be trained squarely on potential paths to long-term solutions (or, at least, long-term ameliorations) rather than getting caught up in momentary dramas. If Trump indeed cares more about his own re-election chances than anything else, as many detractors charge, it's still true that his path to a second term runs through winning a war on the virus, not the daily news cycle.

Even analysts who are focused on the November election need to remind ourselves that seven months is a very long time in politics (seven months ago, for example, the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump's impeachment had yet to surface), and the next seven months will feel especially long. We all might as well settle in as best as we can, because we're going to be stuck here for a while.

Four Reasons to Be Cautious About Trump's Approval Ratings

Ever since the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis began to accelerate a couple of weeks ago, political obsessives have wondered about the likely effect that it would have on President Trump's job approval ratings—and, by extension, his chances of re-election in November. The few surveys that have been conducted over the past week or two don't show any dramatic movement—the FiveThirtyEight model currently estimates Trump's national approval at 43 percent, which is more or less where he's been since the end of the government shutdown in February 2019. But the lack of any apparent decline, combined with recent surveys that showed more respondents endorsing Trump's handling of the coronavirus outbreak than disapproving so far, have inspired some analysts to argue that the president may actually be benefiting politically from the crisis at the expense of the Democratic opposition.

Perhaps that's true. But realistically, it's far too soon to glean much about either the American public's ultimate response to Trump's management of the pandemic or its implications for the upcoming election. Here are four good reasons to exercise some patience before jumping to conclusions:

1. Political leaders' popularity often rises temporarily after the onset of a crisis. Political scientists call this pattern the "rally effect," and it's been documented many times over decades of history; most dramatically, George W. Bush's job approval shot up from about 50 percent to about 90 percent virtually overnight after the events of September 11, 2001. There are several plausible factors contributing to this phenomenon: citizens close psychological ranks around their national leaders in a moment of uncertainty and fear; they evaluate these figures on different criteria than they did before the crisis erupted; and the normally critical opposition party (sometimes) mutes its attacks on the incumbent. Both French president Emmanuel Macron and Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte have enjoyed spikes in popularity during the current coronavirus outbreak, despite (especially in Italy's case) substantial national dislocation and tragedy.

But these popularity bumps fade with time. Either the crisis is soon resolved and citizens turn their attention to other things, or it is not, in which case they start to grow impatient with the effectiveness of their leader. The 2020 general election is still far enough away that even if Trump were to benefit from the rally effect in the short term, it wouldn't be a very reliable signal of his popularity more than seven months in the future.

2. Americans are still learning about the severity and likely duration of this crisis. National journalists are closely following each development of the coronavirus outbreak; most also live in places like New York and Washington where daily life has already been dramatically changed. But large sections of the country aren't as strongly affected so far, and the less obsessively attentive typical resident of middle America will not have experienced the same degree of disruption. Many Americans are presumably still unaware of the probable length of time before things get visibly better, much less return to normal—for example, while it seems quite apparent based on the trajectory of infection that many public school systems that are now closed are unlikely to reopen before the end of the academic year three months from now, few state authorities have yet acknowledged as much in public. Citizens who anticipate that the crisis will only last a matter of a few weeks may see little reason at this point to re-evaluate their opinions about the president, but they may start to feel differently if the inconvenience persists for longer than they first assumed.

3. Americans already have strong opinions about Trump, and most of them disliked him before the crisis. Trump has never consistently exceeded 50 percent job approval as president even during three previous years of relative peace and prosperity. His approval rating among Democrats has seldom reached double digits—it stood at 7 percent in the last Gallup survey—and his approval among independents (as measured by Gallup) has generally stayed between 35 and 40 percent for most of his presidency. The only way that his popularity could fall much further would be for elements of his remaining base—consisting almost entirely of habitual Republican voters—to become disenchanted with his performance, but these citizens are unusually resistant to changing their minds about him. Their partisan alignment means that they are already predisposed to support a Republican president, they are prone to discount criticism from Democrats and mainstream journalists, and they are disproportionately exposed to Trump-friendly messages from conservative media sources.

The good news for Trump is that he may be spared significant erosion in his popularity by the strong loyalty of his fellow partisans. But a steady approval rating could also be a problem, because he's already in a vulnerable position heading into re-election and is consistently running behind likely opponent Joe Biden in national polls. Even if the crisis were merely damaging enough to prevent Trump from boosting his public support by November, that itself might turn out to be a decisive factor in the election.

4. It's not the virus, it's the economy (stupid). The most worrying component of this crisis for the Trump administration and re-election campaign isn't the spread of COVID-19 itself and the casualties that it leaves in its wake. Instead, it's the larger impact on the economy. While the specific quantitative estimates of current forecasting models should be treated with skepticism in such an unprecedented and fast-moving environment, it seems inevitable that there will be a sudden and catastrophic economic shock that will at least temporarily push the U.S. into a recession.

Trump and his supporters will argue, with justification, that it would be unfair to blame him for the economic misery that a worldwide pandemic is poised to inflict on the nation. But voters tend to reward presidents for good economic times and punish them for bad times regardless of the incumbent's actual responsibility for either outcome. It wouldn't be surprising if Trump's popularity remained stable or even rose a bit over the next few weeks during (presumably) the strictest anti-COVID remediation measures, only to decline later in the year once the larger consequences, especially declining income and employment, became more visible to average citizens. He therefore has every reason to wish not only for a shallower economic plunge than most analysts now foresee, but also for a historically rapid national rebound once the worst is over.