The GOP’s position could get even worse
Opinion by
Columnist
Oct. 12, 2020 at 6:45 a.m. CDT
Not too
long ago, the space between the presidential candidates hovered in the
six-to-eight-point range. The FiveThirtyEight average had the
race’s margin just below seven points in late September. After the first, and
so far only, presidential debate on Sept. 29 and
President Trump’s covid-19 diagnosis, the gap widened to about 10 points.
That’s
roughly in line with The Post-ABC News national poll showing
former vice president Joe Biden with a 12-point lead, tied with Trump for
support from men (extraordinary for a Democrat). Moreover, as my
colleagues Scott Clement, Dan Balz and Emily Guskin write, “Biden holds a
23-point advantage among female likely voters (59 percent to 36 percent), while
Trump and Biden split men, 48 percent each. If those figures hold, both would
represent a shift from 2016, when men backed Trump by 11 points and women
favored Hillary Clinton by 13 points.”
Likewise,
in comparison with 2016, Biden has shrunk Democrats’ deficit with White,
non-college-educated voters by 10 points, though Democrats are still down 26
points to Trump with those voters, and boosted the party’s advantage among
White, college-educated voters to 31 points. Trump has managed to lose suburban
women overwhelmingly, garnering the support of just 34 percent of them, vs. 62
percent for Biden. It should be no surprise that race-baiting, calling them “housewives” and recklessness about the novel coronavirus
are losers with these voters.
Down-ticket
Republicans have gotten sucked into Trump’s political death spiral, and we can
expect them to lose House seats and very likely the Senate majority. The Cook Political Report suggests that “the
most likely outcome is a Democratic net gain of between five and ten seats,
with anything from no net change to a Democratic gain of 15 seats possible.”
A total
collapse by Biden is a theoretical, but remote, possibility. Several factors
will determine the magnitude of the blue wave.
First,
will Trump go out on the campaign trail? On Saturday, he
could only appear for a mere 18 minutes in front of a
small crowd, suggesting he may be operating at considerably less than full
strength. Insofar as his doctors are still unwilling to say that he has tested negative for the coronavirus
and his gatherings do not make masks and socially distancing mandatory, there
may be a backlash to his campaign outings. The worst-case scenario for Trump
would be a relapse or another superspreader event. Trump may not yet have hit
bottom.
Second,
will Trump debate again on Oct. 22? The debate commission
is silent on whether such a debate will be remote but has pledged to put in
controls to make the debate more orderly. Trump may not be up to standing for
90 minutes and/or may not want to be muted, so there is no guarantee he will
show up. If he does, and struggles even more than he did in the first debate
when he is not allowed to break the ground rules, there is no telling how much
lower his poll numbers will go.
Third,
how will the stimulus and/or Supreme Court confirmation fight impact the
elections? It is not clear that anything will move the needle on the
presidential race. However, failure to deliver on the stimulus will be one more
stake in the heart of the Republican Senate majority. Republicans seem to have
overestimated any benefit they will get from Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s
nomination and underestimated the aversion to confirming a justice this close
to the presidential election. If the hearings do not go well for her or if the
Judiciary Committee chairman gets riled up as he did in the hearings for now
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who is in a
virtual tie with Democrat Jaime Harrison, may take a
final, debilitating drop in the polls.
