With almost 100 days to go till election day, the virus has changed the issues,

the way the fight is fought – and quite possibly the outcome

David Smith in Washington

@smithinamerica
Published onSat 25 Jul 2020 08.00 BST
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M ar-a-Lago was the place to see and be seen for guests who paid

thousands of dollars for the privilege on New Year’s Eve. Diamonds and furs
abounded on the red carpet. When Donald Trump arrived at his estate in Palm
Beach, Florida, in high spirits and a tuxedo, he declared: “We’re going to have
a great year, I predict.”

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But earlier that day, a Chinese government website had identified a
“pneumonia of unknown cause” in the area surrounding a seafood market in
Wuhan. When midnight struck and 2020 dawned, no one could have guessed
how this microscopic pathogen would turn the world upside down, infecting
15 million people, killing 625,000, crippling economies and wiping out
landmark events such as the Olympic Games.

America is no exception. The coronavirus pandemic has upended the

presidential election, which, on Sunday, will be just one hundred days away. It
has changed the issues, the way the fight is fought and quite possibly the
outcome. The nation’s biggest economic crisis for 75 years, and worst public
health crisis for a century, is an asteroid strike that has rewritten the rules of
politics and left historians grasping for election year comparisons.
“There is probably nothing the same as coronavirus,” said Thomas Schwartz, a
history professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “Obviously, you have
issues that stir the public up: 1968 would have been Vietnam and the
disturbances that had taken place in the cities. But nothing quite as universal
and affecting such a wide band of Americans as the coronavirus. That is really
new.”
Soon after that New Year’s Eve celebration at Mar-a-Lago, Trump would be
acquitted by Republicans at his Senate impeachment trial and triumphantly
brandish the next day’s Washington Post front page at the White House. In his
own mind, at least, he was riding a strong economy on his way to re-election,
while Democrats struggled to tally results in their Iowa caucuses or settle on a
unifying presidential nominee.
Trump in February, in defiant mood following his acquittal in his Senate
impeachment trial. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters
But the virus was on the move. On 22 January, Trump claimed that it “is
totally under control” and is “going to be just fine”. On 2 February, he insisted
he had stopped its spread by restricting travel from China. On 27 February, he
said at the White House: “One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.” And
so it went on in what critics now say was a historic feat of denial and failure in
leadership.
Covid-19 swept through New York, killing thousands of people. Trump
declared himself a “wartime president” and held daily briefings in April but
then reportedly “got bored” and switched emphasis to reviving the economy –
seen as crucial to his re-election chances. Yet while the infection and death
tolls ticked up, his approval ratings ticked down.
Now it seems the old maxim of “It’s the economy, stupid” will be replaced by
“It’s the virus, stupid” as the defining issue for voters, not least because the
suffering and death have a direct impact on the economy itself: Americans
have filed 52.7m unemployment claims over the past four months.
Another famous campaign question, “Are you better off than you were four
years ago?”, now seems purely rhetorical. The Trump campaign has been
forced to abandon the slogan “Keep America great” in favour of “Make
America great again, again”.
Schwartz added: “When Trump had the economy going gangbusters he had a
stronger argument on his behalf that, despite his disruptiveness and
unpleasantness, people were doing OK and things seemed to be moving ahead.
But look at the polling on whether the country’s going in a good direction or a
bad direction and, boy, did that spike with the bad direction since March.”

Trump was arguably an unusually lucky president for his first three years, not
having to face the type of major crisis that confronted many of his
predecessors, enabling him to persist as a gadfly reality TV star tweeting about
celebrities instead of reading national security briefs. With the eruption of the
virus, that luck ran out spectacularly.
America now has 4m infections and more than 140,000 deaths, the highest
tallies in the world. Cases have doubled in the past six weeks even as curves
flatten in Europe.
The president continues to defend his response, pointing to travel restrictions
he imposed, 50m tests conducted – more than any other country – and mass
distribution of ventilators. “We’re all in this together,” he said on
Wednesday. “And as Americans, we’re going to get this complete. We’re going
to do it properly. We’ve been doing it properly. Sections of the country come
up that we didn’t anticipate – for instance, Florida, Texas, et cetera – but we’re
working with very talented people, very brilliant people, and it’s all going to
work out, and it is working out.”
The pandemic was a moment when Trump could have proved his doubters wrong. He
did not rise to the challenge
But his niece Mary Trump, author of a new family memoir, said his handling
of the pandemic has been “criminal”. She added: “It was avoidable, it was
preventable and even if we hadn’t gotten a hold of it right away, the statistics
are pretty clear. Two weeks earlier, what, 90% of deaths could have been
avoided? And they haven’t been, simply because he refused to wear a mask
because doing so would have admitted that he was wrong about something,
and that is something he cannot do.”
The pandemic was a moment when Trump could have surprised the world and
proved his doubters wrong. He did not rise to the challenge in the eyes of
those critics. He failed to devise a national strategy on testing, rarely spoke of
the victims, refused to wear a mask until recently and undermined top public
health experts such as Dr Anthony Fauci.

Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, said: “If you
operate on the basic premise that crisis defines leadership, then you’d have to
say that this crisis has also defined the failure of leadership. That has without
question impacted on politics in this country.
“It’s pretty clear that there are a hell of a lot of constituencies out there that
feel that he’s failed to lead with this issue. There’s a sense that in many ways
he’s basically said, ‘You’re on your own in terms of dealing with this’. He at
one point said he doesn’t take responsibility for what’s happening with this
virus and I think that sent a real message to the country that the president’s
gone awol on the country at a time of crisis.”

Such is the backlash that multiple opinion polls show the Democratic
presidential candidate Joe Biden leading Trump by double digits, and ahead in
the battleground states that will decide the electoral college. The president’s
best hope now might be an “October surprise” in the form of a coronavirus
vaccine. There is no clearer example of how everything has changed than
Texas, which no Democrat has won since 1976. On Wednesday, a record 197
deaths from Covid-19 were reported while a Quinnipiac poll showed Biden
leading Trump 45% to 44%.
Filemon Vela, a Democratic congressman from southern Texas, said: “Since
the beginning of the pandemic, President Trump and our own governor, Greg
Abbott, have made tactical decisions that are now resulting in the killing of
Texans en masse. Any rational thinking Texan would be crazy if they voted for
Donald Trump, given the way that the state is being ravaged by the virus.
“Across the state, ICUs are full. Back in my home town, patients that should be
in the ICU are having to wait in emergency rooms. Patients who can’t get into
emergency rooms are having to wait in ambulances for hours outside the
hospital. It is a catastrophic situation and I believe that, when November
comes around, the people of Texas are going to remember it.”

A protest in support of Black Lives Matter in New York in June. Trump seized on the
protest by attempting to stoke ‘culture war’ divisions. Photograph: Bryan R
Smith/AFP/Getty Images
Against the implacable foe of the virus, Trump has repeatedly sought to divert
and distract. He seized on the Black Lives Matter protests against the police
killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis not with healing and compassion but
by attempting to stoke “culture war” divisions over crime and Confederate
statues. Still, the pandemic persisted.
Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “If the
election becomes a referendum on the president’s handling of the pandemic,
he cannot win. It’s as simple as that and so, barring some miraculously
favourable developments in the next hundred days, he has no choice but to
change the subject as best as he can.”
The pandemic has not only transmogrified the substance of the election but
also the style. Democrats were fortunate to get most their primaries out of the
way and mostly unite behind a nominee before the storm hit. Other rituals of
the election year calendar – campaign rallies, convention speeches,
presidential debates – will be unrecognisable.

So far, the altered landscape appears to be hurting Trump and helping Biden.
In 2016, the Republican thrived on rambunctious rallies where crowds
chanted “Build the wall!” and, referring to his opponent Hillary Clinton, “Lock
her up!” The theatre seemingly gave him a blood transfusion of political
energy while building a cult of personality for crowds, often in long-neglected
small towns, who then fanned out to spread the word.
Last month, however, a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, drew a
disappointingly small crowd amid virus fears, and another in Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, was cancelled. No more have been announced. The president
has also been forced to call off Republican national convention events next
month in Jacksonville, Florida, where he had been planning to make a splashy
acceptance speech before a cheering crowd.
Democrats will also hold a delayed and pared-down convention in Milwaukee
in August, with much of it migrating online. Biden, who at 77 would be the
oldest president ever elected, has been able to lie low in his basement in
Wilmington, Delaware, spared from the punishment of constant campaigning
and awkward encounters that could invite his notorious gaffes. Instead the
pandemic plays to his perceived strengths of empathy, experience and
stability.
Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington,
added: “Nobody’s ever seen anything like this and nobody knows what the net
effect is going to be. I don’t know to what extent the raucous Trump rallies of
2016 were instrumental to his success but what we do know is that’s not a
strategy that can be repeated in 2020.”
But there may be no greater demonstration of the pandemic’s reach than
polling day itself, due to take place on 3 November amid health fears, a surge
of mail-in voting and a prolonged count that Trump might seek to discredit
and exploit.
This week more than 30 advocacy groups and grassroots organisations
joined Protect the Results, a project to mobilise millions of people should
Trump “contest the election results, refuse to concede after losing, or claim
victory before all the votes are counted”.
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Panetta, a former White House chief of staff, has heard similar talk from
friends. “On conferences and Zoom calls and emails I’m getting concern that
this is not a president who has ever shown a tendency to operate with a degree
of class in accepting defeat and so there’s a sense that he will resist the results
of the election if it’s close,” he said.

“I guess the hope for a lot of people I’ve talked to is that the election results are
so clear that it makes it very difficult for the president to even pretend that
somehow the vote was wrong.”