CoronaVirus Pandemic Will Harm Trump Prospects In Key “Swing” States

It is a fact that many senior citizens, the elderly, like Donald Trump, not sure why, but reality.

The number of senior citizens is particularly high in states that voted for Trump, and are often seen as “Red” states, but also as “Swing” states.

This includes the warm weather states of Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona.

And it is reality that senior citizens, sadly, all over the nation, are dying in higher percentages than other groups, due to medical conditions and immunity shortcomings, from the CoronaVirus Pandemic.

It now seems highly likely that a larger number of elderly who tend to like or love Trump, have passed away, and that more will, and will help to swing some “Red” states, particularly the “warm” ones mentioned, and help to elect Joe Biden.

10 comments on “CoronaVirus Pandemic Will Harm Trump Prospects In Key “Swing” States

  1. Jeffrey G Moebus April 23, 2020 8:09 pm

    AhHa…. So it IS a plot to unseat Trump, after all, eh? Heh. Just kidding.

    To lend credence to that claim, however: The CDC reports that, as of April 18, 91.7% of all the COVID-19 deaths in America were people age 55 and older. [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm].

    Looks like Baby Boomers like me [74 in July] and our Elders are in the cross-hairs, eh?

    Which ties right in with Your “Darwin” piece yesterday, Professor. You now: “random variation, natural selection, and survival of the fittest,” and all that.

    The only problem with Your argument is that the overwhelming majority of 55-and-olders who have died are in Blue States, so their deaths probably won’t have much impact on results in those States in November.

  2. D April 23, 2020 8:09 pm

    ‘Layoffs wreck the states that lifted Trump to the White House’

    By Megan Cassella (04.23.2020)
    https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/23/states-that-helped-trump-win-see-biggest-job-losses-204072

    Battleground states that handed Donald Trump the presidency four years ago are seeing higher-than-average layoffs amid an economic downturn wreaking havoc across the country — a dynamic that could hold major implications for November’s election.

    Job losses are piling up in places like Michigan, where more than one in four workers applied for unemployment benefits in the past five weeks, according to a POLITICO analysis of Labor Department data. In Pennsylvania, another key Rust Belt state that voted for Trump in 2016, nearly one-fourth of the workforce has filed an unemployment claim since mid-March. Ohio is seeing more than 17 percent of workers filing jobless claims, outpacing the national average of 16.1 percent, as is Minnesota, a state Trump narrowly lost.

    One of the only major battlegrounds seeing a lower claims rate than the national average is Wisconsin, according to the analysis, which compared claims filed to the number of employees on states’ non-farm payrolls in February. But with more than one in eight workers filing for benefits there, it’s still a dramatic rise for a state that for years boasted an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent or lower, trending below the national average.

    The numbers are likely to continue rising for weeks, as states work through a backlog of applications and race to dole out benefits to gig workers and others who are newly eligible for aid. They’ll remain elevated as long as restaurants, retail stores and other non-essential businesses remain shuttered. And even once some areas of the country begin to reopen, it could be months or years before Americans are back to work at the same levels as before — undercutting Trump’s plans to hang his re-election bid on leading the economy to a robust recovery.

    Instead, Democrats across the country are already working to make the remainder of the 2020 campaign a referendum in part on the economic fallout from the coronavirus, and whether more could have been done to avoid shutdowns that threw more than 26 million Americans out of work in just over a month.

    “The economy is in a freefall now. And I don’t think it had to be this bad,” said Lavora Barnes, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party.

    Some state-level Republicans, meanwhile, are calling for a staggered reopening of businesses, arguing that continued shutdowns in Michigan and elsewhere are no longer necessary and only making job losses worse. The Trump campaign defended the president for taking decisive action starting in January to combat the coronavirus. Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews said that while economic growth has been “artificially interrupted,” Trump is “the best suited to restore it to greatness.”

    In Florida, the country’s largest battleground state, laid-off workers have consistently encountered issues over the past few weeks trying to file applications for unemployment, struggling to access aid in a state where it was already difficult to do so. A POLITICO analysis shows about 13 percent of workers there have filed for unemployment benefits in the past five weeks, less than the national average. But as of last week, only about 6 percent of applicants had received benefits payments through the broken system, ranking it among the worst in the country for fulfilling claims.

    That payout level now sits at less than 16 percent, according to statewide data. Political ramifications have been swift: Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican and close Trump ally, is one of the few big-state governors who has seen his approval ratings drop over his handling of the pandemic.

    “It’s the most consistently negative aspect of this whole situation in Florida, the unemployment benefits system not working,” said Susan MacManus, a political analyst in the state and former chair of the Florida Elections Commission. “If you’re a single parent, if you’re a head of a household, you’re not going to forget this.”

    DeSantis has said he was “disappointed” in his state’s initial response and sidelined the official in charge of overseeing the unemployment assistance program.

    Economic downturns historically have been harmful if not fatal for incumbent presidents, because voters tend to blame them for their change in circumstances. Political scientists point to Jimmy Carter’s failed re-election bid in 1980 and George H. W. Bush’s in 1992 as two modern examples of one-term presidents whose campaigns were plagued by economic woes.

    Even states where unemployment claims rates are at or below the national average are still seeing a dramatic uptick in layoffs and furloughs. The major question at this point is whether economic issues and uncertainty persist or worsen by November, or whether they begin to rebound. A turnaround starting by late summer would be the “best-case scenario” for Trump, said Charles Franklin, a pollster and professor at Marquette Law School in Milwaukee.

    “It’s really rare for an incumbent administration to get positive credit for bad times,” Franklin said. “The longer this crisis lasts, the more difficult that is for the Trump administration to deal with.”

    Franklin cautioned that voters might not blame the Trump administration for the pandemic and related fallout if they feel it’s something that “could hit any president.” But others argue the White House could have done more to prepare — and that earlier action would have avoided the need for widespread shutdowns and allowed for an easier recovery.

    Barnes, of the Michigan Democrats, has embraced that approach. “Some of this could have been mitigated with a quicker and better response from the federal government,” she said. She added that now that layoffs have taken place, the Trump administration could still be doing more to help unemployed workers, including by helping them regain access to healthcare.

    In Pennsylvania, the state has been divided over how to move forward, with the Republican-led legislature passing a bill to reopen some businesses that Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed this week. Wolf himself has sought to toe the line between the two parties, saying he “absolutely” supports the idea of getting back to work but emphasizing a need to “make sure that we’re doing this responsibly.”

    Other Democrats in the state are less circumspect. “At every opportunity, we will work to remind voters that the president failed to prepare for this,” said Andres Anzola, deputy communications director for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party.

    Republicans in Pennsylvania and Michigan have begun to agitate for reopening businesses, and both states are among those seeing protesters gather to call for an end to the shutdown. In Michigan, Republicans are hoping voters will blame the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, rather than Trump.

    Whitmer took “draconian measures” by enacting a sweeping shutdown, said Tony Zammit, communications director for the Michigan Republican Party.

    “The governor went above and beyond what other states have done in terms of their shutdown, and it’s caused an excessive amount of unemployment here,” he said.

    Much will change in the six-plus months remaining before November’s presidential elections, and many Americans will be able to go back to work once businesses begin to reopen. But a heightened unemployment rate is all but certain to remain an issue in the fall, even under the rosiest of economic forecasts.

    An optimistic scenario would have the economy bouncing back in the second half of the year, which is possible if businesses begin to reopen and economic activity picks up, said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. But even then, she said the unemployment rate nationally would probably remain around 8 percent a year from now, and closer to 10 percent by the election.

    “The damage that has been done to the economy is just really, really dramatic,” she said. “It’s going to take some time to get back.”

  3. Ronald April 23, 2020 8:13 pm

    Yes, D, the circumstances, economically, and in age of many dying in “”Red” States, harms Trump dramatically!

  4. Princess Leia April 23, 2020 10:19 pm

    How Trump’s COVID Immigration Policies Could Become Permanent
    If he’s reelected, America may remain closed even after it is pandemic free.

    https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/04/21/how-trumps-covid-immigration-policies-could-become-permanent/

    Donald Trump’s late-night Monday tweet—declaring plans to “temporarily suspend immigration into the United States”—is at once less and more significant than it seems.

    It is less significant because the Trump administration has already used the COVID-19 crisis to stop most migration into America. The country has halted almost all visa processing and postponed visa interviews. Both the Mexican and Canadian borders have been shut down. Migrants and asylum seekers found at either border are now deported immediately. And it’s now clear that the president’s newest executive action won’t be as expansive as his tweet. Today, for example, the administration said it will continue letting some guest workers in.

    The declaration is more significant because it signals that Trump has now carried out perhaps his most notorious promise—to end almost all immigration. For years, Trump has used the language of crisis for years to try and halt immigration. It’s no surprise that he’s now taking advantage of a genuine emergency. His presidential campaign famously began with a declaration that Mexican immigrants were “rapists” and that the U.S. had become “a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems.” After stoking breathless Fox News coverage of an arriving migrant caravan (or, as he called it, an “invasion”), Trump deployed thousands of military troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. And to make good on his trademark pledge to “build the wall,” Trump actually declared a national emergency and redirected billions of military dollars to construct new barriers.

    In the past, some of Trump’s sweeping attempts to halt immigration by executive fiat have been circumscribed by the courts. But the coronavirus changes the balance-of-powers calculus. To respond to the disease’s outbreak, the federal government needs more power, including over entry to the country. For as long as the pandemic persists, Trump may face less institutional opposition to his immigration policies.

    But what happens once the pandemic ends? Scientists currently estimate it will take at least another 12 to 18 months before a vaccine is available. If that’s correct, the country may not be pandemic free until well after the November presidential elections. The “new normal” for American immigration, then, will rest on who wins. Under a Biden administration, it’s reasonable to assume that almost all of these policies will eventually be reversed. But under a continued Trump administration, America’s COVID immigration regime might become permanent.

    As Gaby Del Valle writes in the Monthly’s most recent print issue:

    [Should Trump win a second term, he will likely nominate at least one additional Supreme Court justice and add to the nearly 200 federal judges he has appointed so far (a quarter of all federal judges). The legal firewall that has held back the most radical of his executive orders could crumble. He will continue to target not just undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, but legal immigrants as well.]

    It’s not just the courts that may sign off. As Del Valle argues, faced with a second Trump term, it’s even possible that a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives would trade broad cuts to immigration for dreamer protections.

    [The Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. If the Court lets the program end, Trump may go to Democrats in Congress and promise protection for Dreamers, but only in exchange for broader immigration cuts. The party shut down the government for several days in January 2018 to try to make sure Dreamers wouldn’t be deported, and failed…. It isn’t hard to imagine that to protect them, come 2021, Democrats would give Trump what he wants.]

    Right now, Trump’s orders may seem transient. But a second Trump term could mean they will be with us long after the coronavirus is gone.

  5. Rational Lefty April 24, 2020 1:28 pm

    I hear that people in Georgia are protesting to keep businesses closed.

  6. Princess Leia April 24, 2020 1:35 pm

    If you don’t die from the virus, Trump is either going to cause you to die from poisoning or getting skin cancer.

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