“Do you think Trump can win?”
One after another nervous Democrat asked that as Nov. 8, 2016 approached. No, I reassured them. Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have been a mess viewed from our redoubt, but a Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster. As crazy as Americans can be, they were not that crazy.
Then I greeted voters outside a nearby polling place on Election Day. A smiling woman wearing a thick, black shawl in seventy-degree weather offered Republican voters a list of “pro-life, pro-Israel, constitution and liberty” candidates. Occasionally, she raised her arms and talked to the cloudless sky.
With that in mind, a new, economy-based election model from Oxford Economics this far out from Nov. 3 is not looking favorable for her god-king. The unemployment rate could be above 13%. CNN Business reports:
The model, which uses unemployment, disposable income and inflation to forecast election results, predicts that Trump will lose in a landslide, capturing just 35% of the popular vote. That’s a sharp reversal from the model’s pre-crisis prediction that Trump would win about 55% of the vote. And it would be the worst performance for an incumbent in a century.
“It would take nothing short of an economic miracle for pocketbooks to favor Trump,” Oxford Economics wrote in the report, adding that the economy will be a “nearly insurmountable obstacle for Trump come November.”
The last time a major-party presidential candidate garnered less than 40% of the vote was 1972. George McGovern’s 37.5% was a point less than Barry Goldwater earned in 1964.
With the economy this fall still “in a worse state than at the depth of the Great Depression,” another Oxford model based on state results predicts Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina flip to Democrats for a final electoral vote tally of 328 to 210. “The economy would still be in a worse state than at the depth of the Great Depression,” the Oxford Economics report says. Yet, the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2016 had fallen from Great Recession levels to 4.7%.
Regular readers will appreciate that I have a jaundiced eye when it comes to predicting human behavior based on the economy. Consider Talks To The Sky.
Perhaps a better gauge of voter behavior will be voters’ gut reaction to “American carnage.” Losing a loved one, a pastor, or friends to a deadly pandemic made worse by the inaction of a “president” hopelessly out of his depth may cut more deeply even than economic pain.
Columbia University researchers estimate that moving even a week sooner to impose social distancing measures might have saved an additional 36,000 Americans their lives. Starting two weeks sooner could have saved 54,000 lives by the end of May, a reduction of 83%.
Two weeks is less time than Trump dithered while assuring Americans the novel coronavirus was no worse than the flu and boasting his China travel ban had stopped it. In fact, COVID-19 was already here and spreading fast.
The New York Times puts just a few names and stories alongside the numbers:
Rushia Stephens, a music teacher who had become a county court records technician in an Atlanta suburb, collapsed on her bedroom floor, unable to breathe, and died on March 19. Adolph Mendez, a businessman in New Braunfels, Texas, was confined to his own bedroom as his terrified family tended to him until he died on March 26. Richard Walts, a retired firefighter in Oklahoma, was ferried to a hospital in an ambulance and died two weeks later, on April 3.
Mr. Mendez’s widow, Angela Mendez, said she still couldn’t say for sure whether action should have been taken earlier. It didn’t matter now anyway, not for her husband.
“They probably could have had earlier a better way to not let this pandemic go that far,” she said. “But they didn’t.”
Georgia, Texas, and Oklahoma are traditionally “red” states. They are likely to become less red as the death count mounts. Trump’s ignoring his own experts’ advice and insisting states reopen their economies in the absence of 14 days of declining COVID-19 cases may bite harder than economic losses and missing a few more dinners out. Economic losses can be recovered. Losing a loved one is forever.
Aaaaand it’s #reopen season for America’s mass shooters.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.