In any other time, with any other president, the remark would have evaporated into the Washington air as just another piece of dime-store punditry. But Senator John Thune’s admonition last week that Donald Trump is in deep election year doo-doo made waves precisely because it was so obvious. “Trump has a problem with the middle of the electorate, with independents, and they’re the people who are undecided in national elections,” Thune, the Republican Majority Whip, told reporters in the Capitol. “I think he can win those back, but it’ll probably require not only a message that deals with substance and policy but, I think, a message that conveys, perhaps, a different tone.” Ya think? Finally, someone in Washington with a microphone and pulse said out loud what most political leaders, journalists, and pundits have been tiptoeing around for years: Trump is a historically unpopular president with no message, and unpopular presidents without a message lose elections.
This was true even before coronavirus arrived and widened the president’s deficit in the polls. For the duration of his presidency, Trump’s approval ratings have been roughly equivalent to where Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter ended up on Election Day, shellacked and schlonged. Yet Thune’s words made news because top Republicans, drunk on power and cowed by their red-hat base, have weirdly avoided stating the truth about Trump’s toxicity for years now, even as Democrats have won almost every election up and down the ballot going back to 2017. Pretty much every Republican strategist working on a House and Senate race in 2020 knows it too. And they understand that Trump won’t suddenly go “on message” with four months left until Election Day. Many of those same GOP operatives are old enough to remember a long ago time, way back in 2006, when Republicans were clear-eyed enough about George W. Bush’s unpopularity that they advised their candidates to go ahead and put some distance between themselves and the president to save their own skins. But Republicans today, for the most part, are willing to stand with Trump and fulfill their end of a suicide pact that was pretty apparent from the moment, almost four years ago, that a minority of Americans sent a person who doesn’t read books to the White House.
On his MSNBC show, Chuck Todd called Thune’s remarks “easily the most direct critique of the president’s leadership by a Republican senator not named Mitt Romney that I have heard in months.” Peter Baker of the New York Times agreed. “This is actually normal,” Baker said. “And what is abnormal is three years of not seeing members of the Republican Party break with the president when his numbers are down. The numbers now have gotten so far down that they’re really, really worried.” What took them so long? Republican anxieties were exacerbated last week by a New York Times/Siena poll showing Trump losing by 14 points, a margin far wider than anything he faced in 2016, when he actually had a message and an opponent as disliked as he was. Trump is losing independents by 21 points, women by 22 points, moderates by 33 points, and he’s even losing old people, a rare feat for a Republican. Were it not for the PTSD of election night 2016, everyone in politics would be saying confidently that Trump’s grotesquely bad poll numbers are just the logical denouement of a presidency undone by either malice or incompetence, depending on the day. But 2016!, is the tiresome retort. The boring reality is that Trump won a margin-of-error race between two historically disliked candidates, in hindsight the equivalent of a .300 hitter getting on base with a dinky single into left field. He has no magical powers.
Trump has simply done nothing to fix the popular rejection he faced in the 2018 midterms. He is incapable of doing so. In a USA Today/Suffolk poll this week, Democrats opened up a 14-point lead (51–37%) on the generic congressional ballot, the biggest margin they’ve had all year. America’s suburbs are filled with so many women and millennials champing at the bit to vote against Trump that states like Texas, Georgia, and Arizona are now in play for Joe Biden, a trend, if it holds, that would send Trump to the most resounding national defeat in a generation. Swing voters have moved against Trump so hard that Ohio is starting to resume its traditional role as bellwether, with the Trump campaign spending money there. It is actually remarkable. Challengers typically try to make a presidential race a referendum, not a choice. When it works, it’s because voters are iffy about the person in the Oval, and the challenger nurses those doubts with daily attacks. Sure, Biden is talking every day, but it’s not clear voters are hearing him. Trump alone has made the race a referendum on himself. It’s not that he’s inhabiting a bad political environment. He created the bad political environment—out of thin air—just by being himself. Yes, of course, the usual caveats apply: The race will probably get closer, the Electoral College is its own beast, Biden and Trump have yet to share a debate stage, and the pandemic’s impact on voting is still an underexamined worry. Still, even if the polls tighten, June will be remembered as the month when Democrats, Wall Street, the tech world, lobbyists, and foreign governments started to prepare themselves for a Biden presidency.
What a Biden presidency looks like, though, is still in question. Biden has announced new policies, tacked to the left to satisfy both the base and the times, and promised to lead the country out of the new recession, just as the Obama–Biden administration did a decade ago. He’s taken big swings. Biden wants a stimulus “a hell of a lot bigger” than the $2 trillion response passed by the Trump administration, he’s promised to forgive rent payments for those affected by the shutdown, and told donors this week that he would roll back Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. But you don’t hear any of those things about Biden from voters. And that factor, for Democrats in and around Biden’s campaign, is what’s tempering all of this summery optimism. Although the fundamentals clearly favor the challenger, there’s a number buried in even the most hopeful polls that just can’t be ignored: While the former vice president now leads Trump on almost every qualitative measure—race, immigration, health care, empathy—Trump is consistently beating Biden on the economy. “It keeps me up at night, the idea that maybe somehow we would move beyond the zone we are in now, and the question is still there about who’s best to recover the economy,” said Nick Gourevitch, a top Democratic pollster who works with the Super PAC Priorities USA Action. “It seems hard to believe that we are going to be there in four months, but that is a potential problem.”
For most of the pandemic, with unemployment hovering above Great Recession–era levels, and with the incumbent’s overall job approval rating underwater, Trump has been running anywhere from 6 to 10 points ahead of Biden on the question of who would better handle the economy. In the Times/Siena poll last week, a majority of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, 50%–45%. The same is true in all the key states. In don’t-tax-me Florida, Trump has a four-point edge on the economy, according to a Fox News poll last week showing Biden winning the state. Trump’s margin on the economy was even wider in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, where Biden is sitting on barely-there leads. In Wisconsin, which could be the tipping point state in November, majorities of voters said they haven’t even been affected by the economic downturn, according to a Marquette University poll last week. Over 60% of Wisconsin voters described their financial situation as “living comfortably,” a number that should give any Democrat pause.
The simplest explanation for Trump’s advantage is that voters don’t blame him for the economic slowdown. They blame COVID-19. But there are other forces at work. Trump has steadily been above water on the economy question for most of his presidency compared to “Democrats,” an ambiguously defined foil for most of his attention-grabbing term. As wacky as it sounds to Democrats, for plenty of voters, Trump still has the patina of dealmaking businessman, the guy who slapped his name on free government money at the beginning of the pandemic. “Getting checks from him is probably having an impact,” said a longtime Democratic strategist working in the battleground states. “Even though the New York Times and everybody else in the media are characterizing all of the CARES Act stuff one way, it doesn’t mean that people receiving the benefits understand it that way. And that’s probably helping him too.”
Then there’s the fact that “the economy” is a simplistic catch-all term thrown around by pollsters and the media, a not-so-valuable barometer given that voters are generally bad judges of the country’s economic health, only their own well being. Voters derive their impressions about the economy from their personal circumstances, signals from the media and, these days, their political leader of choice. “There’s an old battle among studiers of elections,” said Austan Goolsbee, who served as chief economist under Obama for the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. “Do people vote on their actual economic conditions, or do they vote on what they perceive or what they’re seeing in the media or told by the president, et cetera? And there are different episodes that seem to support each of the sides. In 1992, for people old enough to remember, Bill Clinton beat George Bush senior, absolutely on a platform based on the recession. But actually 1992 was a perfectly fine economic year; 1991 was the recession, but 1992 was fine. And that’s kind of evidence that there’s a heavy component of what people see in the media having a strong influence on how they think the economy is doing regardless of what the actual data show.”
In Trump’s case, his megaphone is louder than any political leader to come before him. When Trump brags about the booming stock market as a proxy for the economy, the media talks about it too, even as they’re fact-checking him. The many nuanced and complicated story lines of the current downturn—reduced work hours, delayed rent payments, stay-at-home childcare, health care costs—will always play second fiddle to a mind-bending Trump sound bite, however dubious or misleading. Biden, despite talking about the economy almost every day, gets no such coverage. Take June 5, when the federal government reported 2.5 million new jobs, a better-than-expected report. Trump took a victory lap, even though the unemployment rate is still an abysmal 13.3%, with over 20 million people out of work. MSNBC and Fox News took his press conference live, with CBS News breaking in to programming for a “Special Report.” But none of those networks took Biden live when he spoke about the economy three hours later.
A recent series of focus groups and polls conducted by the Democratic polling firm GQR Research for Unite the Country, a pro-Biden Super PAC, laid bare the challenge for Biden. According to the research presentation obtained by Vanity Fair—from two Democrats not affiliated with the Super PAC or GQR—a series of five April focus groups demonstrated three economic pain points for Biden. First, that Trump is seen as better equipped to steer the country out of a recession. Second, that while Biden is seen as understanding working and middle-class struggles, his economic agenda is almost completely undefined. And third, that few people hold Trump personally responsible for the country’s punishing unemployment rate, blaming the coronavirus instead. Using the focus groups as a table setter, GQR then polled two sets of swing voters online, in the Sunbelt and Upper Midwest, during the second week of June, after the peak of Black Lives Matter protests but also following the jobs report and a bounce-back in the stock market. The samples were majority white, non-college educated and under the age of 50, the profile of the Obama–Trump voter. Much of the results resembled public polls. Biden held a 10-point overall lead in the Sunbelt—Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina—and a five-point overall lead in the Midwest—Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Reviews of Trump’s overall job performance, his handling of the racial unrest and his response to the coronavirus were abysmal. But among Sunbelt swing voters, 56% approved of Trump’s handling of the economy. In the Midwest, 58% approved.
More than half of those polled mentioned economic issues as a factor in their vote, with both subgroups naming “steering us through the economic crisis” as the most important candidate quality. In both regions, Biden held a narrow edge in two categories, “strengthening the middle class” and “up to the challenge of being president.” But the presentation bluntly warned that, “Trump leads Biden by wide margin on economic traits.” Questioned on which candidate would do better “steering us through the economic crisis,” Trump held a 15-point lead in the Sunbelt and a 22-point lead in the Midwest. Trump’s advantages were even larger on “creating jobs”—24 points in the Sunbelt and 30 points in the Midwest. Trump was also leading on the qualities of “creating jobs” and “standing up for America.” On the economy, respondents detected not even a whiff of an economic message from Biden. Voters are expressing a desire for change, the GQR presentation said. But, the pollsters warned, “the desire for change should not be confused with liking Biden. These voters do not have a favorable impression of either candidate.” Voters really only understood that Biden was Obama’s vice president. Impressions that Biden is “old and senile” were also frequently mentioned in the focus groups, perhaps unsurprising to anyone who has spent time on the political internet in recent years.
The research suggested that while Biden is seen as empathetic and having the right leadership traits for office, voters need to hear more. “We do need to prove to these voters that Biden can lead the country economically and create jobs,” the research advised. “We must introduce Biden to these voters as someone who can handle the economic crisis. We do not necessarily need to ‘win’ this issue—voters preferred Romney over Obama in 2012 on the economy—but just not lose it by current levels.” (In 2012 exit polls, Romney and Obama basically broke even on the economy question, 49%–48%.) A follow-up memo from GQR to Unite the Country had a more dire warning. “The biggest threat to Biden,” it said, “is the belief that…Donald Trump is better equipped to navigate the country out of the economic collapse.” The memo called it “the central challenge of the Biden campaign right now.” Under a list of challenges and recommendations, the pollsters stressed that swing voters “have little depth in their knowledge of Biden.... One of the many downsides of the virus is that it deprived Biden of the victory lap most party nominees enjoy once the question is settled where they can introduce themselves to voters outside the primary community.” The memo emphasized that the hair-on-fire Trump outrage dominating cable news and Twitter every day is far removed from how swing voters actually perceive the president’s responsibility for the economic calamity:
The pollsters urged Unite the Country to remedy these perceptions by running ads about Biden’s working-class upbringing, his humility and personal traits, and his work on the Recovery Act, a point Biden has stressed in interview after interview since the economy ground to a halt in March. Data in hand, Unite the Country launched a series of TV and digital ads in Midwestern battlegrounds last week reminding voters of Biden’s work on the recovery, touting 14 million new jobs created and the administration’s efforts to save the auto industry. “He’s done it before, he’ll do it again,” one of the ads declares, flashing on images of Biden and Obama side by side. “Trump has one lane to the basket right now, and I view it as our job to block that lane with whatever we’ve got,” said Lily Adams, an adviser to Unite the Country. “Things look good and we’re encouraged by the numbers, but like everybody, we’re not going to sit around and count on polls in June,” Adams told me. She said their field research, included in the GQR presentation, added much-needed texture to the economic debate, revealing ways to talk about the downturn beyond the stock market or unemployment rate. Their data showed that among the Midwestern swing voters, 15% said their hours had been reduced without pay or they had been laid off, 10% said they were not able to pay their bills, 8% were unable unable to get medical care for conditions, and 9% had either cut the size of their meals or skipped meals altogether. “For the voters who are going to decide this election, the recession is going to remain top of mind,” Adams said. “And once you introduce people to just a little bit of information about Vice President Biden and his accomplishments on the economy, they feel confident in his abilities to lead us out of it.”
With the economy in its current schizophrenic state, in which millions of W-2 wage earners are relatively unaffected while millions of small business owners and gig workers feel deep pain, there’s no easy way to gauge how Trump’s current advantage might play out. Financial trauma has aftereffects that reverberate for years. Already, in some polls, Trump’s edge has started to wither. In a Gallup poll this week, Trump’s approval on the economy fell to 47%, down from 58% in February. Tuesday’s USA Today/Suffolk poll showed similar erosion, with Trump only leading Biden 49%–47% on who would better manage the economy. Still, the same poll showed that 54% of Americans are “optimistic” about the economy, with 39% saying they were pessimistic. “The starting point here is that nothing like this has ever happened before,” Goolsbee told me. “We might look at this in two months and the one residual strength that Trump has in the polls, being that people think he’s done well in the economy, that may easily have evaporated as people look around and are like, ‘Whoa, the unemployment rate is in double digits and the economy and data coming in and it looks really bad’…There’s always a pretty substantial lag between the actual conditions and when they show up in the polls.” The Democratic strategist working in battleground states told me, optimistically, that while the economy question “is the one number holding Trump up right now,” it may not register more deeper anxieties. “I’m making this up, but say 55% of Americans think Trump is doing a good job on the economy,” the strategist told me, “what doesn’t get reflected is that underneath, people are starting to have doubts, and then they just sort of decide, Yeah this isn’t working, and his economy number drops to 45. And on the way, like in those climate change videos, the ice sheet is melting and then it suddenly breaks off and those people are gone from Trump forever.”
Like many Democrats, Gourevitch, the Priorities USA Action pollster, told me that while he’s keeping an eye on the economy number, it might also not matter in the end. It didn’t in 2016, when Hillary Clinton basically tied Trump on the economy question and won voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin who named the economy as their top concern. But the race was decided by more visceral issues, like race, immigration, gender, and trust. This one feels visceral too, and Trump no longer has Clinton as a foil. “Pundits have this natural inclination to say elections are about the economy,” he said. “But a lot of things are pointing us to evidence that this one’s not, that voters are not making their choices about the president based on the economy. I think they’re increasingly accepting of the argument that things in general are worse because of what Trump has done. People tend to think about elections as a broader holistic thing, rather than about the economy specifically.” The larger atmospherics, he said, might be too difficult for Trump to overcome. In other words, the idea that Trump is winning on the economy in Georgia and Texas is very much besides the point. The point is that Georgia and Texas are competitive, which tells us far more about the mood of the country and its appetite for another four years of Trump. Majorities of the country believe the country is on the wrong track. Majorities, too, are repulsed by Trump’s hubris and personality, including plenty of soft Republicans now drifting in Biden’s direction. A poll this month from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found, astonishingly, that 80% of Americans think the country is “out of control.” That number alone would likely cost any incumbent president his job, though sometimes it feels like we’ve become so numb to the chaos that no one remembers what control actually feels like. None of these numbers are “issues” in the traditional sense. But Trump found his way to the White House by capitalizing on the politics of emotion and personality. It might turn out that he loses that way too.
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