Politics

Essential Politics: Trump's reelection just got tougher – Los Angeles Times

Published

5 years ago

March 20, 2020

President Trump got to the White House through audacity combined with unexpected luck, winning key states by tiny margins even as he lost the nationwide popular vote.

Now, his luck may have run out.

As the economy sinks into a deep recession, and the death toll from the coronavirus starts to rise, Trump’s chances of a second term have fallen.

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But there’s a world of difference between down and out, as Trump’s boom-and-bust career has amply shown. Even without the economic boom he had hoped to run on, Trump has considerable political strength. No one should count him out yet.

The political cost of a recession

Political scientists have long pointed to April, May and June of the election year as a key period for voters’ decisions.

The national political conventions during the summer and the intense campaigning of the fall do matter, but typically, the major parties both do competent jobs and essentially fight to a draw.

As a result, what usually matters most is what voters think about the state of the nation before the campaign starts. Because voter perceptions tend to lag by a few months, conditions in the second quarter of the year repeatedly show up as the best predictors of how the election will turn out.

This year, the second quarter will be awful for Trump. As Don Lee wrote, the latest economic statistics show the country rapidly swinging from record-low unemployment to a jobless rate that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned could hit 20% if Congress doesn’t quickly pass measures to keep the economy afloat.

Even with a major stimulus bill, a recession this year seems unavoidable. The only questions are how deep and how long.

One widely accepted model of how elections work illustrates the impact a recession could have: Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, developed his “Time for Change” election model nearly three decades ago, and it has stood up well. His model correctly forecast that Trump would win in 2016, although Abramowitz, himself, doubted that could be true.

The model puts numbers behind a couple of basic assumptions. One is that voters strongly favor incumbents for a second term but usually swing toward the other party after eight years — hence “time for change.” The other is that economic conditions in the second quarter, measured by the change in the gross domestic product, combined with a president’s overall approval rating in June of the election year, tell you what you need to know about which side will win.

By that model, as Abramowitz wrote this week, Trump’s a goner.

His low approval ratings already made his reelection prospects dicey, the model suggests. Add in the recession, and the model points to “an electoral college landslide for Trump’s Democratic challenger,” Abramowitz wrote.

But not so fast, he added.

Models aren’t crystal balls. All that they can do — even the best ones — is to summarize what has happened before and project what would happen next if past is prologue. But what if we’ve moved into a truly different era?

Not Trump, us

The argument that things are different now sometimes gets framed as Trump having a seemingly magical ability to escape bad news.

He doesn’t. Instead, Trump’s hold on his supporters says much more about the country than him.

America’s two parties once straddled a lot of divisions in society. Through the late 1990s, both parties had a mix of young and old, urban and rural, college and non-college, religious and non-religious, and even, to some extent, white and non-white partisans.

Over the past generation, that’s stopped being true. The parties have realigned in ways that reinforce those other divides rather than bridge them.

Democrats have become the party of the nation’s urban centers, those who don’t adhere to traditional religious denominations, people of color and the lion’s share of voters younger than 45. Republicans have become a largely uniform party dominated by older, white, Christian, rural conservatives.

Because of that, partisan identity has increasingly become tied to personal identity. The number of voters who swing back and forth in elections has declined — although they remain crucial — and news events that once would have dramatically shifted a president’s standing with the public now produce very little change.

Trump intuitively understands that and has exploited it. Deprived of his economic argument, expect him to play on those divisions to the maximum extent as he strives to keep his hold on power.

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Trump’s emerging strategy

Trump has clearly telegraphed his reelection strategy in his news briefings this week. As Noah Bierman and Eli Stokols wrote, he’s trying to save his reelection campaign by casting himself as a “wartime president” and depicting the virus as a foreign invader.

That’s what’s behind his constant labeling of the disease as the “Chinese virus.” Trump’s at heart a marketer, and he knows the power of labeling his adversary, whether it’s “Crooked Hillary” or “little Rocket Man.”

With the virus, he’s trying to drive home the idea that illness is connected to foreigners, linking the battle against the disease to his long-standing opposition to immigration, which has been at the core of his political message from day one.

The fact that the label upsets liberals just makes it more attractive to Trump, who can count on his opponents to help spread his message that he’s willing to stand up to the foreign enemy, and they’re not.

The fight over what to call the virus is this year’s analogue to the argument in 2016 over the label “Islamic terrorism.” In both cases, Trump’s approach is to draw his opponents into an argument on his terms in which he can depict himself as protecting the “real Americans” against an elite that willingly sacrifices U.S. interests to placate foreigners.

In the meantime, he has played up his executive powers, signing a measure to potentially use the wartime Defense Production Act, for example, as Chris Megerian wrote.

As is typical with him, Trump has also exaggerated what he’s doing, as he did Thursday, when he falsely said the Food and Drug Administration had approved new potential cures for the virus, forcing the head of the FDA to gently correct him during a televised briefing.

Trump also exaggerated the speed at which the Pentagon could ready hospital ships, which the military does intend to deploy. The Pentagon is also looking at building tent hospitals to help with coronavirus treatment, David Cloud reported.

Trump has also made much of border closures, telling Americans to avoid international travel and closing border crossings with Canada and Mexico to “nonessential” travel.

Mexico may face a grim picture in coming weeks because its top leaders are in denial about the problem, Kate Linthicum wrote from Mexico City.

Administration’s record has many holes

Trump’s effort to convey command runs up against one huge problem: the administration’s record, which will give Democrats lots of ammunition to attack Trump.

His repeated denials that the virus was a serious problem have already been turned into campaign-year ads. More are sure to come.

Although Trump repeatedly has said that “nobody knew there would be a pandemic” and that the virus “came out of nowhere,” the opposite is true, as Noam Levey, Anna Phillips and Kim Christensen wrote.

U.S. officials and outside experts have warned over and over for nearly two decades that a pandemic of this sort was not only likely, but almost inevitable and have urged the government to do more to get ready. It hasn’t. The national emergency stockpile of ventilators, for example, isn’t nearly large enough for the current crisis, Del Wilber wrote.

Trump’s not alone in having not done enough, but the crisis has happened on his watch.

Moreover, some of the administration’s policies have weakened the healthcare safety net and made responding to the virus harder. The administration is now having to reverse some of its healthcare policies, Levy wrote.

Democratic primary campaign fades away

Sen. Bernie Sanders hasn’t conceded the race to Joe Biden, but on Wednesday, after the latest round of primary losses, his campaign manager announced he would head home soon to “assess” his campaign, Janet Hook wrote.

There’s not a lot to assess. Biden has a lead of about 300 delegates and has been winning primaries in every part of the country by large margins.

On Thursday, Tulsi Gabbard dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. She had long ago stopped being a factor in the race. In Florida’s primary this week, for example, she got less than 1% of the vote and came in behind four candidates who had already dropped out. Still, her endorsement of Biden represented another straw in the wind — she had prominently backed Sanders in 2016.

The bigger issue now is the extent to which the coronavirus threatens the country’s ability to hold the November election. Evan Halper looked at the growing calls for expanded vote by mail and the GOP opposition to doing so in some states.

Could Trump delay the election? Not without risking forfeit to a Democrat, Halper wrote. The Constitution clearly sets Jan. 3 as the end of his term. If he’s not reelected, the next in line might be Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat in the Senate.

In the meantime, as lawmakers begin falling ill from coronavirus, Congress may move to remote work. That would represent a huge change for a tradition-bound institution. The Senate currently doesn’t even allow electronic voting.

A grim choice

The overall context in which officials are making decisions right now is a dreadful choice for global leaders: Wreck your economy or lose millions of lives. The pandemic will be with us until an effective vaccine comes online — probably 18 months — or a drug is developed to treat the illness.

That likely means a year or more of lockdowns, economic disruption and overwhelmed healthcare systems. Anyone who thinks they can reliably forecast what that means for the nation’s politics hasn’t been paying attention.

To our readers: Sign up for Coronavirus Today, a special edition of the Los Angeles Times’ Health and Science newsletter that will help you understand more about COVID-19.

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Austrian far-right party hopes for its first national election win in a close race

Published

4 hours ago

September 28, 2024

Anne Joseph

VIENNA (AP) — Austria’s far-right Freedom Party could win a national election for the first time on Sunday, tapping into voters’ anxieties about immigration, inflation, Ukraine and other concerns following recent gains for the hard right elsewhere in Europe.

Herbert Kickl, a former interior minister and longtime campaign strategist who has led the Freedom Party since 2021, wants to become Austria’s new chancellor. He has used the term “Volkskanzler,” or chancellor of the people, which was used by the Nazis to describe Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Kickl has rejected the comparison.

But to become Austria’s new leader, he would need a coalition partner to command a majority in the lower house of parliament.

And a win isn’t certain, with recent polls pointing to a close race. They have put support for the Freedom Party at 27%, with the conservative Austrian People’s Party of Chancellor Karl Nehammer on 25% and the center-left Social Democrats on 21%.

More than 6.3 million people age 16 and over are eligible to vote for the new parliament in Austria, a European Union member that has a policy of military neutrality.

Kickl has achieved a turnaround since Austria’s last parliamentary election in 2019. In June, the Freedom Party narrowly won a nationwide vote for the first time in the European Parliament election, which also brought gains for other European far-right parties.

In 2019, its support slumped to 16.2% after a scandal brought down a government in which it was the junior coalition partner. Then-vice chancellor and Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache resigned following the publication of a secretly recorded video in which he appeared to offer favors to a purported Russian investor.

The far right has tapped into voter frustration over high inflation, the war in Ukraine and the Covid pandemic. It also been able to build on worries about migration.

In its election program, the Freedom Party calls for “remigration of uninvited foreigners,” and for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an “emergency law.”

Gernot Bauer, a journalist with Austrian magazine Profil who recently co-published an investigative biography of the far-right leader, said that under Kickl’s leadership, the Freedom Party has moved “even further to the right,” as Kickl refuses to explicitly distance the party from the Identitarian Movement, a pan-European nationalist and far-right group.

Bauer describes Kickl’s rhetoric as “aggressive” and says some of his language is deliberately provocative.

The Freedom Party also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of western military aid to Ukraine and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defense project launched by Germany.

The leader of the Social Democrats, a party that led many of Austria’s post-World War II governments, has positioned himself as the polar opposite to Kickl. Andreas Babler has ruled out governing with the far right and labeled Kickl “a threat to democracy.”

While the Freedom Party has recovered, the popularity of Nehammer’s People’s Party, which currently leads a coalition government with the environmentalist Greens as junior partners, has declined since 2019.

During the election campaign, Nehammer portrayed his party, which has taken a tough line on immigration in recent years, as “the strong center” that will guarantee stability amid multiple crises.

But it is precisely these crises, ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and resulting rising energy prices, that have cost the conservatives support, said Peter Filzmaier, one of Austria’s leading political scientists.

Under their leadership, Austria has experienced high inflation averaging 4.2% over the past 12 months, surpassing the EU average.

The government also angered many Austrians in 2022 by becoming the first European country to introduce a coronavirus vaccine mandate, which was scrapped a few months later without ever being put into effect. And Nehammer is the third chancellor since the last election, taking office in 2021 after predecessor Sebastian Kurz — the winner in 2019 — quit politics amid a corruption investigation.

But the recent flooding caused by Storm Boris that hit Austria and other countries in Central Europe brought back the topic of the environment into the election debate and helped Nehammer slightly narrow the gap with the Freedom Party by presenting himself as a “crisis manager,” Filzmaier said.

Nehammer said in a video Thursday that “this is about whether we continue together on this proven path of stability or leave the country to the radicals, who make a lot of promises and don’t keep them.”

The People’s Party is the far right’s only way into government.

Nehammer has repeatedly excluded joining a government led by Kickl, describing him as a “security risk” for the country, but hasn’t ruled out a coalition with the Freedom Party in and of itself, which would imply Kickl renouncing a position in government.

The likelihood of Kickl agreeing to such a deal if he wins the election is very low, Filzmaier said.

But should the People’s Party finish first, then a coalition between the People’s Party and the Freedom Party could happen, Filzmaier said. The most probable alternative would be a three-way alliance between the People’s Party, the Social Democrats and most likely the liberal Neos.

___

Associated Press videojournalist Philipp Jenne contributed to this report.

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In Alabama, Trump goes from the dark rhetoric of his campaign to adulation of college football fans

Published

5 hours ago

September 28, 2024

Anne Joseph

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — As Donald Trump railed against immigrants Saturday afternoon in the Rust Belt, his supporters in the Deep South had turned his earlier broadsides into a rallying cry over a college football game as they prepared for the former president’s visit later in the evening.

“You gotta get these people back where they came from,” Trump said in Wisconsin, as the Republican presidential nominee again focused on Springfield, Ohio, which has been roiled by false claims he amplified that Haitian immigrants are stealing and “eating the dogs … eating the cats” from neighbors’ homes.

“You have no choice,” Trump continued. “You’re going to lose your culture. You’re going to lose your country.”

Many University of Alabama fans, anticipating Trump’s visit to their campus for a showdown between the No. 4 Crimson Tide and No. 2 Georgia Bulldogs, sported stickers and buttons that read: “They’re eating the Dawgs!” They broke out in random chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” throughout the day, a preview of the rousing welcome he received early in the second quarter as he sat in a 40-yard-line suite hosted by a wealthy member of his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Trump’s brand of populist nationalism leans heavily on his dark rendering of America as a failing nation abused by elites and overrun by Black and brown immigrants. But his supporters, especially white cultural conservatives, hear in that rhetoric an optimistic patriotism encapsulated by the slogan on his movement’s ubiquitous red hats: “Make America Great Again.”

That was the assessment by Shane Walsh, a 52-year-old businessman from Austin, Texas. Walsh and his family decorated their tent on the university quadrangle with a Trump 2024 flag and professionally made sign depicting the newly popular message forecasting the Alabama football team “eating the Dawgs.”

For Walsh, the sign was not about immigration or the particulars of Trump’s showmanship, exaggerations and falsehoods.

“I don’t necessarily like him as a person,” Walsh said. “But I think Washington is broken, and it’s both parties’ faults — and Trump is the kind of guy who will stand up. He’s a lot of things, but weak isn’t one of them. He’s an optimistic guy — he just makes you believe that if he’s in charge, we’re going to be all right.”

The idea for the sign, he said, grew out of a meme he showed his wife. “I thought it was funny,” he said.

Katie Yates, a 47-year-old from Hoover, Alabama, had the same experience with her life-sized cutout of the former president. She was stopped repeatedly on her way to her family’s usual tent. Trump’s likeness was set to join Elvis, “who is always an Alabama fan at our tailgate,” Yates said.

“I’m such a Trump fan,” she said, adding that she could not understand how every American was not.

Yates offered nothing disparaging about Trump’s opponent, Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris, instead simply lamenting that she could not stay for the game and see Trump be recognized by the stadium public address system and shown pumping his fist on large video screens in the four corners of Bryant-Denny Stadium.

That moment came with 12:24 left in the second quarter, shortly after Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe ran up the right sideline, on Trump’s side of the field, to give the Crimson Tide an eye-popping 28-0 lead over the Vegas-favored Bulldogs.

Trump did not react to Milroe’s scamper, perhaps recognizing that Georgia, not reliably Republican Alabama, is a key battleground in his contest against Harris. But when “the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump” was introduced to the capacity crowd of more than 100,000 fans — all but a few thousand wearing crimson — Trump smiled broadly and pumped his fist, like he had done on stage in July after the bullet of a would-be assassin grazed his ear and bloodied his face.

The crowd roared its approval, raising cell phone cameras and their crimson-and-white pompoms toward Trump’s suite, where he stood behind the ballistic glass that has become a feature after two assassination attempts. A smattering of boos and a few extended middle fingers broke Trumpian decorum, but they yielded to more chants of: “USA! USA! USA!”

Indeed, not everyone on campus was thrilled.

“There is, I think, a silent majority among the students that are not with Trump,” argued Braden Vick, president of Alabama’s College Democrats chapter. Vick pointed to recent elections when Democratic candidates, including President Joe Biden in 2020, vastly outperformed their statewide totals in precincts around the campus.

“We have this great atmosphere for a top-five game between these two teams, with playoff and championship implications,” Vick said, “and it’s just a shame that Donald Trump has to try to ruin it with his selfishness.”

Trump came as the guest of Alabama businessman Ric Mayers Jr., a member of Mar-a-Lago. Mayers said in an interview before the game that he invited Trump so that he could enjoy a warm welcome. And, as Mayers noted, Trump is a longtime sports fan. He tried to buy an NFL team in the 1980s and helped launch a competing league instead. And he attended several college games as president, including an Alabama-Georgia national championship game.

Mayers also invited Alabama Sens. Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville. Britt, a former student government president at Alabama, delivered the GOP response to Biden’s last State of the Union address, drawing rebukes after using a disproven story of human trafficking to echo Trump’s warnings about migrants. Tuberville, a former head football coach at Auburn University, Alabama’s archrival, is a staunch Trump supporter.

Joining the politicians in the suite were musicians Kid Rock and Hank Williams Jr. Herschel Walker, a Georgia football icon and failed Senate nominee in 2022, traveled in Trump’s motorcade to the game.

Fencing surrounded parts of the stadium, with scores of metal detectors and tents forming a security perimeter beyond the usual footprint. Sisters of the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority showed their security wristbands before being allowed to their sorority house directly adjacent to the stadium. Bomb-sniffing dogs stopped catering trucks carrying food. Hundreds of TSA agents spread out to do a potentially unpopular job: imposing airport-level screening for each ticket-holder.

But what seemed to matter most was a friendly home crowd’s opportunity to cheer for Trump the same way they cheered the Crimson Tide, unburdened by anything he said in Wisconsin or anywhere else as he makes an increasingly dark closing argument.

“College football fans can get emotional and kooky about their team,” Shane Walsh said. “And so can Trump supporters.”

They didn’t even mind that Trump’s tie was not crimson. It was Georgia red.

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Politics

B.C.’s NDP, Conservatives nominate full slates of candidates for Oct. 19 election

Published

6 hours ago

September 28, 2024

Anne Joseph

VICTORIA – Elections BC says the New Democrats and Conservatives have nominated full slates of candidates for the upcoming Oct. 19 provincial election.

Elections BC says in a statement the two main parties will field candidates for each of the province’s 93 ridings, while the Green Party nominated 69 candidates.

Nominations closed Saturday afternoon with 323 total candidates, of which 269 represent seven different political parties and 54 who are contesting the election as Independents or unaffiliated candidates.

Elections BC says the official list includes five Freedom Party of B.C. hopefuls, four Libertarians, three representing the Communist Party of B.C. and two candidates from the Christian Heritage Party of B.C.

There are no BC United candidates.

BC United officials said earlier they might run some candidates in the election to preserve the party entity for the future after Leader Kevin Falcon announced the suspension of BC United’s election campaign in late August to prevent a centre-right vote split.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 28, 2024.

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