Protesters and supporters of President Donald Trump in Columbia, South Carolina, October 25, 2019. (Sam Wolfe/Reuters)
A look ahead at the infection election
As recently as mid February, President Trump seemed to be in the best political shape he had ever been in. His job-approval numbers had been climbing since late October, as impeachment and Democratic primaries dominated the news. Bernie Sanders had won most of those early primaries, suggesting Trump would be running against someone who divided his own party and held a suite of unpopular views. The unemployment rate continued to hit new lows. We seemed to be on track to have the fourth incumbent president reelected in a row.
Then biology upended politics. We now know less about how November will go than we usually do at this point in a presidential-election year. We don’t know the future course of the virus: whether there will be a second wave, what the death toll will be, whether people will feel safe going to the polls. We don’t know what the economy will look like: whether a recovery will have begun and, if so, how robust it will be.
Even if we had answers to those questions, we would not know how those voters who are up for grabs would judge these developments. If the economy is rapidly improving but unemployment remains much higher than in the spring, will the improvement or the earlier decline matter more to them? Will they be looking for someone to blame for all our losses, in which case Trump will suffer? (Deservedly or not.) Or will they take the perspective that disaster can strike, mistakes in responding to them are inevitable, and the country has survived and begun to recover?
Even amid all this uncertainty — in these “unsettled times,” to use the language of every other advertisement on TV these days — we can confidently make a few nontrivial observations about the shape of the campaign to come.
The first is that Trump is the underdog.
In the second half of March, as the coronavirus began to dominate national life, President Trump’s net approval rating rose from –8 to –3 in the RealClearPolitics average: a substantial improvement, given the narrow band in which those numbers have moved over the last three years. Over the course of April, though, he gave back most of those gains. He appears to have benefited from a muted, and mostly temporary, version of the “rally around the flag” effect that often lifts heads of government during crises. Previous presidents, and such current leaders in other countries as Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron, saw their ratings rise by more.
Even during his March upswing, however, Trump barely improved in polls testing him against Joe Biden among registered voters. Biden is consistently leading in polls of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin: five states Trump won in 2016. Democratic victories in those states would be more than enough to make Trump the first president to be defeated for reelection in 28 years.
In 2016, overlapping majorities of the public disliked both of the major-party nominees. Those voters who disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton — the Trump campaign’s analysts called them “double haters,” according to Joshua Green’s book Devil’s Bargain — broke heavily at the end for the Republican. Trump is viewed much more favorably now than he was four years ago, since a lot of Republicans have changed their opinion about him, and Biden is viewed more favorably than Clinton was. Among those who dislike both Trump and Biden, though, Biden has an enormous lead.
Election analyst Henry Olsen, writing in the Washington Post, sees some hope for Trump in the fact that he does slightly better in job-approval polls than in head-to-head polls against Biden. If a lot of the voters who approve of Trump’s performance but are undecided in the contest will be for him in the end, he is only slightly behind Biden.
The second thing we know is that the election will be less a “referendum” on Trump’s performance than a “choice” of candidates.
For a long time, presidential-reelection outcomes were thought mainly to representup-or-down verdicts by the public on the incumbent’s performance. It is a theory that challengers still cherish. The classic cases are 1980 and 1984. By 1980, the public had decided that Jimmy Carter was failing as president, and Ronald Reagan needed only to establish that he was an acceptable alternative to win. In 1984, the public had decided that Reagan was a success, and Walter Mondale had no chance.
In recent elections with incumbent presidents, the challengers’ campaigns have promoted the theory. In 2004, Democratic political strategists argued that the public had turned against President George W. Bush, who was below 50 percent approval for much of the spring and summer; Democratic nominee John Kerry merely had to clear the threshold of acceptability, they said. Bush’s strategists argued that they would succeed in making the election more about Kerry’s flaws than the referendum theory suggested, and that Bush’s performance would look better as voters paid more attention to those flaws. The Republicans were right.
The next time an incumbent was up for reelection, in 2012, the parties switched sides. Republican strategists and spinners said that Barack Obama, who was under 50 percent in the spring and summer, was losing a referendum election. This time they were wrong.
In retrospect, it appears that the referendum theory of presidential elections was an artifact of a less politically polarized time. When a lot of voters floated between the parties, presidents could win or lose landslides based on their perceived performance. Now we have two hardened and roughly evenly matched party coalitions with more uniformly antagonistic views, and almost all voters lean toward one or the other of them. An incumbent starts with a high floor of support, and highlighting the ideological and personal defects of his opponent is effective in keeping those who are on the outskirts of his camp from leaving.
A third safe prediction is that the campaign will dwell more on the characters and personalities of the nominees than on their policies. This is of course a matter of degree. But if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination, we could have expected a more policy-based campaign. Sanders is enthusiastic about his policy ideas, and the Trump campaign was enthusiastic about running against them.
Biden, on the other hand, seems to come alive when promising to restore decency to the White House and talking about Trump’s deficiencies. The Trump campaign seems to view Biden’s main vulnerabilities as personal ones: his age, his many years in Washington, his son Hunter’s trading on his father’s offices, and now Tara Reade’s accusation that he sexually assaulted her when she was working for him.
The coronavirus has had a huge effect on our health, public policy, and economy. Its long-term impact is yet to be seen. As momentous as the epidemic is, though, we can already see signs that one thing it cannot disrupt is the polarization of our electorate.
This article appears as “The Infection Election” in the May 18, 2020, print edition of National Review.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston says it’s “disgraceful and demeaning” that a Halifax-area school would request that service members not wear military uniforms to its Remembrance Day ceremony.
Houston’s comments were part of a chorus of criticism levelled at the school — Sackville Heights Elementary — whose administration decided to back away from the plan after the outcry.
A November newsletter from the school in Middle Sackville, N.S., invited Armed Forces members to attend its ceremony but asked that all attendees arrive in civilian attire to “maintain a welcoming environment for all.”
Houston, who is currently running for re-election, accused the school’s leaders of “disgracing themselves while demeaning the people who protect our country” in a post on the social media platform X Thursday night.
“If the people behind this decision had a shred of the courage that our veterans have, this cowardly and insulting idea would have been rejected immediately,” Houston’s post read. There were also several calls for resignations within the school’s administration attached to Houston’s post.
In an email to families Thursday night, the school’s principal, Rachael Webster, apologized and welcomed military family members to attend “in the attire that makes them most comfortable.”
“I recognize this request has caused harm and I am deeply sorry,” Webster’s email read, adding later that the school has the “utmost respect for what the uniform represents.”
Webster said the initial request was out of concern for some students who come from countries experiencing conflict and who she said expressed discomfort with images of war, including military uniforms.
Her email said any students who have concerns about seeing Armed Forces members in uniform can be accommodated in a way that makes them feel safe, but she provided no further details in the message.
Webster did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a news conference Friday, Houston said he’s glad the initial request was reversed but said he is still concerned.
“I can’t actually fathom how a decision like that was made,” Houston told reporters Friday, adding that he grew up moving between military bases around the country while his father was in the Armed Forces.
“My story of growing up in a military family is not unique in our province. The tradition of service is something so many of us share,” he said.
“Saying ‘lest we forget’ is a solemn promise to the fallen. It’s our commitment to those that continue to serve and our commitment that we will pass on our respects to the next generation.”
Liberal Leader Zach Churchill also said he’s happy with the school’s decision to allow uniformed Armed Forces members to attend the ceremony, but he said he didn’t think it was fair to question the intentions of those behind the original decision.
“We need to have them (uniforms) on display at Remembrance Day,” he said. “Not only are we celebrating (veterans) … we’re also commemorating our dead who gave the greatest sacrifice for our country and for the freedoms we have.”
NDP Leader Claudia Chender said that while Remembrance Day is an important occasion to honour veterans and current service members’ sacrifices, she said she hopes Houston wasn’t taking advantage of the decision to “play politics with this solemn occasion for his own political gain.”
“I hope Tim Houston reached out to the principal of the school before making a public statement,” she said in a statement.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
REGINA – Saskatchewan Opposition NDP Leader Carla Beck says she wants to prove to residents her party is the government in waiting as she heads into the incoming legislative session.
Beck held her first caucus meeting with 27 members, nearly double than what she had before the Oct. 28 election but short of the 31 required to form a majority in the 61-seat legislature.
She says her priorities will be health care and cost-of-living issues.
Beck says people need affordability help right now and will press Premier Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party government to cut the gas tax and the provincial sales tax on children’s clothing and some grocery items.
Beck’s NDP is Saskatchewan’s largest Opposition in nearly two decades after sweeping Regina and winning all but one seat in Saskatoon.
The Saskatchewan Party won 34 seats, retaining its hold on all of the rural ridings and smaller cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 8, 2024.
HALIFAX – Nova Scotia‘s growing population was the subject of debate on Day 12 of the provincial election campaign, with Liberal Leader Zach Churchill arguing immigration levels must be reduced until the province can provide enough housing and health-care services.
Churchill said Thursday a plan by the incumbent Progressive Conservatives to double the province’s population to two million people by the year 2060 is unrealistic and unsustainable.
“That’s a big leap and it’s making life harder for people who live here, (including ) young people looking for a place to live and seniors looking to downsize,” he told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
Anticipating that his call for less immigration might provoke protests from the immigrant community, Churchill was careful to note that he is among the third generation of a family that moved to Nova Scotia from Lebanon.
“I know the value of immigration, the importance of it to our province. We have been built on the backs of an immigrant population. But we just need to do it in a responsible way.”
The Liberal leader said Tim Houston’s Tories, who are seeking a second term in office, have made a mistake by exceeding immigration targets set by the province’s Department of Labour and Immigration. Churchill said a Liberal government would abide by the department’s targets.
In the most recent fiscal year, the government welcomed almost 12,000 immigrants through its nominee program, exceeding the department’s limit by more than 4,000, he said. The numbers aren’t huge, but the increase won’t help ease the province’s shortages in housing and doctors, and the increased strain on its infrastructure, including roads, schools and cellphone networks, Churchill said.
“(The Immigration Department) has done the hard work on this,” he said. “They know where the labour gaps are, and they know what growth is sustainable.”
In response, Houston said his commitment to double the population was a “stretch goal.” And he said the province had long struggled with a declining population before that trend was recently reversed.
“The only immigration that can come into this province at this time is if they are a skilled trade worker or a health-care worker,” Houston said. “The population has grown by two per cent a year, actually quite similar growth to what we experienced under the Liberal government before us.”
Still, Houston said he’s heard Nova Scotians’ concerns about population growth, and he then pivoted to criticize Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for trying to send 6,000 asylum seekers to Nova Scotia, an assertion the federal government has denied.
Churchill said Houston’s claim about asylum seekers was shameful.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” the Liberal leader said. “He is overshooting his own department’s numbers for sustainable population growth and yet he is trying to blame this on asylum seekers … who aren’t even here.”
In September, federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there is no plan to send any asylum seekers to the province without compensation or the consent of the premier. He said the 6,000 number was an “aspirational” figure based on models that reflect each province’s population.
In Halifax, NDP Leader Claudia Chender said it’s clear Nova Scotia needs more doctors, nurses and skilled trades people.
“Immigration has been and always will be a part of the Nova Scotia story, but we need to build as we grow,” Chender said. “This is why we have been pushing the Houston government to build more affordable housing.”
Chender was in a Halifax cafe on Thursday when she promised her party would remove the province’s portion of the harmonized sales tax from all grocery, cellphone and internet bills if elected to govern on Nov. 26. The tax would also be removed from the sale and installation of heat pumps.
“Our focus is on helping people to afford their lives,” Chender told reporters. “We know there are certain things that you can’t live without: food, internet and a phone …. So we know this will have the single biggest impact.”
The party estimates the measure would save the average Nova Scotia family about $1,300 a year.
“That’s a lot more than a one or two per cent HST cut,” Chender said, referring to the Progressive Conservative pledge to reduce the tax by one percentage point and the Liberal promise to trim it by two percentage points.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail, Houston announced that a Progressive Conservative government would make parking free at all Nova Scotia hospitals and health-care centres. The promise was also made by the Liberals in their election platform released Monday.
“Free parking may not seem like a big deal to some, but … the parking, especially for people working at the facilities, can add up to hundreds of dollars,” the premier told a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Halifax.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 7, 2024.
