Professor: Trump squandered a ‘golden opportunity’ to confront coronavirus

A panel of election experts suggested President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, combined with record voter turnout, likely cost him the 2020 election.

Emory University Professor Alan Abramowitz, for example, said the pandemic offered Trump a “golden opportunity” to demonstrate leadership and effectiveness.

Rather than confront the virus, though, Trump downplayed the seriousness of it, contradicted his own medical experts and politicized the disease response.

“He blew it,” Abramowitz said Tuesday, during a Washington State University Foley Institute panel discussion regarding the results of the 2020 election. “In the end, I think that was the difference.”

Other participants in Tuesday’s online event included Cornell Clayton, director of the institute, Professor David Brady with Stanford University and Keena Lipsitz, an author and associate professor at Queens University in New York.

Brady noted that Trump got a “mini-bump” in the polls in March, when he first suggested COVID-19 was a serious threat.

“That was the only time he was at 50 percent approval,” Brady said. “He had 20 percent of Democrats approving of his job on the COVID, and among independents, 61 percent approved. But within two weeks, all of that disappeared.”

“He seemed almost incapable of taking (the virus) seriously and really trying to lead,” Abramowitz said. “This was the biggest challenge, the biggest crisis to confront the federal government in decades, and he failed miserably.”

One thing the president did succeed in doing was driving up voter participation.

Although final results aren’t yet available, Clayton said at least 67 percent of the eligible voting-age population in the country took part in the 2020 election. That’s the highest participation rate since 1900.

Biden currently leads the popular vote by a margin of 76.4 million to 71.7 million, or about 4.7 million votes. By the time all remaining ballots are counted, Abramowitz said, that could increase to as much as 8 million and the total number of votes cast will exceed 150 million — easily the largest total in U.S. history.

“People just really wanted to vote for or against President Trump,” he said.

The high turnout may have worked against him in the battleground states — the relatively small number of states where the results could have gone either way.

“There were only eight states where the outcome was in any doubt, where the margin was under 5 percent, and Biden won five of those,” Abramowitz said.

Compared to the 2016 election, Brady noted that voter turnout was up in all the battleground states. However, it typically increased more for Biden voters than for Trump.

“That’s what accounted for Biden’s victory in this set of states,” he said.

Polling data also suggests a majority of Biden voters were actually voting against Trump, rather than for Biden, Brady said. Trump voters, by comparison, typically voted for him because they approved of the job he’s doing.

Moderate voters — whether Republican, Democrat or independent — also favored Biden, giving him enough votes to win the battleground states, along with enough electoral votes to put him over the top.

The message to liberal or progressive Democrats, Brady said, is that moderates are the king-makers.

“If you look at the states Biden flipped, a candidate any more to the left would not have done as well,” he said.

Trump still hasn’t concede his loss in last week’s election, and has filed a lawsuit seeking to delay certification of the results in Pennsylvania.

“He’s arguing that voting by mail, as opposed to in person, constitutes an equal protection violation, because mail ballots are fraudulent and infringe upon the rights of those who (vote in person),” Lipsitz said

She described the lawsuit as a “Hail Mary” and suggested it would not prevail, both because the courts generally frown on lawsuits brought after an election and because, if the court ruled in Trump’s favor, “they would have to throw out mail-in ballots across the country.”

About 65 million absentee or mail-in ballots were cast this year, Lipsitz said, or more than 40 percent of the total.

“It’s very unlikely the Supreme Court is going to do anything,” she said. “The point of all this litigation isn’t necessarily (filed) in expectation of winning. It’s more to support the notion that this is an illegitimate election.”

The large number of cases filed this year also gives the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority an opportunity to “chip away” at election laws, Lipsitz said.

For example, she noted that, in a recent Wisconsin case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh “seemed to suggest that the state’s interest in conducting orderly elections outweighs voters’ interest in having every vote counted.”

Going forward, all three panelist felt Trump would remain a defining force within the Republican Party even after he leaves office.

“It’s Trump’s party, still,” Abramowitz said. “If he’d lost decisively and a lot of Republicans in the House and Senate had gone down with him, it might have been different. But Republicans gained seats in the House and will probably hold onto the Senate. So for the time being, at least, I think you’ll see Trump continue (to be a force). I think that’s part of what this legal battle is all about: By saying the election was stolen — and he’ll keep saying that, even after he’s out of office — that’s part of his appeal to his base.”

Given the continued opposition from Republicans and the division between progressives and moderates in the Democratic Party, “I think it will be hard for Biden to move forward in a unified manner,” Lipsitz said.

The complete video from Tuesday’s panel discussion, as well as video from previous Foley Institute 2020 election events, can be found online at foley.wsu.edu.

Spence may be contacted at bspence@lmtribune.com or (208) 791-9168.