Rashid A Mughal
PRESIDENT Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in a nail-biter election in key swing states, demonstrating both the president’s enduring appeal among his fervent supporters and his inability to expand his sphere of support. Going into election night, the polls appear to have missed the enthusiasm of Trump’s base, which turned out in force to reelect him. But firing up his supporters wasn’t enough to win, especially after Trump had turned off key constituencies over the last four years. The close margins in swing states show how close Trump was to re-election—and how he let opportunities to ensure it slip through his fingers. After assuming office in January 2017, Trump wasted no time in building a campaign operation that his campaign manager ironically nicknamed the “Death Star”. He amassed a war chest before Democrats even started running. As their primary raged, the economy was strong enough for voters to keep faith in Trump’s handling of it. His team exuded confidence they would coast to victory. Then, the Coronavirus hit America and so began Trump’s woes. Since Biden did not win in a landslide, it’s easy to think that the result could have been different if the country were not enduring a global pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and battered the economy in the span of just eight months. Once it arrived, it was inevitable the Coronavirus would shape the 2020 contest. But it didn’t have to be a drag on Trump’s re-election. If he had responded responsibly, it could have been his golden ticket to a second term by proving his leadership skills to voters already slipping from his grasp.
When the pandemic arrived in full force in March, national polls showed Trump was behind Joe Biden, then the presumptive Democratic nominee, by four percentage points. Trump had always been unpopular: he earned fewer votes than his 2016 opponent, and after the first week of his presidency, his approval rating never outstripped his disapproval rating. Rather than reach out to disaffected Republicans and independents, Trump pushed a xenophobic agenda that pandered to his base, alongside a conservative economic agenda that betrayed his populist appeals of 2016. His approval of white supremacists and his bullying demeanor immediately turned off voters who had hoped he would become “Presidential” once in office. In the 2018 midterms, his party lost decisively in a rebuke of the administration’s agenda. But when the virus arrived, Americans were willing to give him a shot.
Initially, a small majority of people thought Trump’s response to the virus was going fine. According to a weekly poll tracking how Americans view the pandemic from Navigator Research, a progressive polling think-tank, in March they approved of his handling of the pandemic by a margin of 52 to 42 percent. There certainly was a rallying-behind-the-leader effect. Then he blew it, and the poll quickly picked up growing misgivings. Respondents came to believe that Trump was downplaying the risk of infection, bucking the advice of doctors and scientists, and lying to the American people. (Democrats and their allies didn’t waste time mounting ad campaigns reminding voters of Trump’s virus failures.) In late October final pre-election survey report was released by HUB, research project, finding that such concerns about Trump remained unchanged even after he had had COVID and USA had gone through two surges, entering a third one, with nine million cases, over 220,000 people dead. The biggest difference is that Donald Trump’s approval on handling the pandemic went underwater by 16 points. That number represents a 26 point drop from the first poll.
In late May, Trump seized on something else as his last best hope for re-election. Following the videotaped murder of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer, an estimated 26 million protesters hit the streets to demand an end to anti-Black police brutality. To Trump, it was a chance to transform the election into a referendum, as he began incessantly tweeting, “Law & Order!” Trump sought, like Richard Nixon in 1968, to ride a wave of white racial angst over race riots to a presidential victory. But to millions of Americans, Floyd’s death was a wake-up call that the country remained mired in systemic racism. People were genuinely alarmed by his death, alongside the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and the ever-growing list of Black people killed by police. They were further alarmed by images of excessive force against protesters, including an elderly man whom Buffalo police shoved to the ground and left bleeding from the head.
On June 1, federal agents used chemical irritants to disperse peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Park outside the White House so that Trump could walk a few feet to St. John’s Church, where he held up a bible for a photo op. When people were asked if they approved of how chemical agents had been used on the protesters, only 23 percent of respondents said yes. According to the poll, that still remains the most disapproved action that Trump took. Democrats realized the photo-op, intended to bolster Trump’s image, was moving voters away from him. The picture soon began appearing in pro-Biden ads. Trump misjudged the uprising, which was not just a moment of Black protest, but a multi-racial coalition against longstanding injustice. Trump’s campaign re-oriented its focus towards the protests, portraying Democrats as the party of lawless rioters and Antifa mobs. Support for the protests largely held up and as the campaign wore on, Trump’s appeals became more explicit. He was obsessed, in particular, over suburban women, warning them, in so many words, that their neighborhoods were at risk of a non-white invasion. “Suburban women, will you please like me?” he said in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in October.
But the pleas were too late. All one had to do, was to look at Republicans’ shellacking in the suburbs in 2018 to know that women living there were already bolting from the GOP. Trump’s desperate message of racial fear wasn’t winning enough of them back. Many saw Floyd cry out to his mother as he was being killed, and dismissed Trump’s racial demagoguery. By September, 64 percent of suburban woman disapproved of the President. From the American carnage moment in his inaugural speech until the end of the campaign where he promised to fire Dr. Fauci, nothing he did to expand his coalition. All he was interested and focused was on getting as many claps from his base crowd as possible. Biden’s victory proved he (Trump) was wrong and lived in utopia.
— The writer is former DG (Emigration) and consultant ILO, IOM.
