Donald Trump’s response to COVID
There is a growing electoral threat to Donald Trump, and it is poised to swamp him in the 2020 elections taking place just 99 days from now. If you guessed that the secret weapon is COVID, you’re only partially correct. Indeed, Trump’s deadly failure to respond to the Coronavirus has now claimed the lives of 150,000 Americans. But in particular, the secret weapon that is poised to defeat Trump in 2020 is a giant bloc of voters that is terrified of COVID, and that went for Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
By now, we are all affected by Coronavirus, but the disease especially affects seniors (age 65 and over), as well as their families. Why is that so bad for Donald Trump? It’s because seniors vote more than any other age group in America, with a massive 70.9 percent voting rate in 2016. Moreover, while Trump won the senior vote by seven percent over Clinton in 2016, he now trails Joe Biden among senior voters. And it gets even worse for Trump, as the population of seniors keeps growing.
This turnaround by seniors against Trump can be seen, for example, in Florida, which is near the top in both highest median age and highest percentage of seniors of any state. Anecdotally, here in Florida, the terror that seniors feel regarding COVID is palpable. For example, while many younger residents and visitors can still be seen gathering in social groups, not wearing masks and not social distancing, seniors, many of whom are ordinarily quite active, can barely be seen out and about except for occasional trips to the grocery store and/or the drugstore. Likewise, many such seniors are very vocal about their Coronavirus fears, and can be heard criticizing those who are acting irresponsibly and putting them at risk.
And what is Donald Trump doing to assuage these fears that seniors and the rest of us have? Essentially, nothing. As has been well documented, Trump has downplayed the Coronavirus from the beginning, refuses to take responsibility, and continues to play golf as more Americans get sick and die. At least partly as a result of his inaction on COVID, Trump has had a dramatic decline in support among seniors in Florida, from a 17 point victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 to now running three points behind Biden.
Joe Biden’s campaign has capitalized on Trump’s growing weakness among senior voters as a result of these Coronavirus failures. For instance, the Biden campaign released a hard-hitting new ad yesterday, featuring a woman whose grandmother died of COVID, “all alone” because the family was not allowed to visit her in the hospital. The woman states in the ad that:
The president made a huge mistake in downplaying this virus. There was a lack of leadership, a lack of responsibility, and a lack of resources. I felt like our elderly have not been a priority for this administration, that they don’t matter. And I feel like my grandmother didn’t matter.
In the last line of the ad, the woman tearfully says, “it just breaks my heart.”
To be sure, there are other voting groups who are also abandoning Donald Trump right now, as his approval rating and the direction of the country/right track/wrong track polls are all dismally low. But the shift of seniors against Trump from 2016 to 2020 is perhaps the most consequential electoral change of all. Now, as we have stated before, if Trump had taken effective steps to protect seniors and all of us from the Coronavirus, we might be looking at a very different electoral picture. But then, we would have to be looking at a very different Donald Trump, and a very different Republican Party which enables him.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/lWN6Zt
