There has been almost no coverage of the 2020 presidential campaign in the past week. There have been no campaign events. No speeches. Nobody out on the proverbial “campaign trail.” COVID-19 dominates the news cycle.
Ten states have now postponed their scheduled primary elections. A number of those postponements are now scheduled for Tuesday, June 2.
Because there is no real opposition to Donald Trump’s nomination for a second term, Republican presidential primary elections are one by one being cancelled outright, never to be rescheduled.
The closest available comparison to the 2020 campaign season is 1918, the year that the Spanish Flu pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, including 675,000 in the United States. 1918 was a midterm election year. It took place during the Woodrow Wilson administration in the waning days of World War I. Republicans took control of both houses of Congress amid very low voter turnout.
Had the coronavirus pandemic not broken out, President Donald Trump would likely already be holding his signature campaign rallies in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Hoping to provide down ballot support, he would likely have Texas cities like Dallas and Houston on the schedule. Were it not for the coronavirus outbreak, he would have be trumpeting a roaring economy, record low unemployment, increases in domestic manufacturing, rising wages, falling food stamp and welfare dependence and polls showing that a majority of Americans were feeling optimistic about their financial futures.
None of those things is true today.
On the Democratic side, Joe Biden’s campaign, written off for dead following the New Hampshire primary, was on a roll following Super Tuesday three weeks ago – prior to the coronavirus disruptions. Biden holds a commanding delegate lead and was in position to effectively wrap the nomination up. That will likely still happen, but, due to postponed primaries in ten states, not as quickly as once thought.
Bernie Sanders has all but disappeared from the news cycle. But so has Joe Biden.
The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin on July 13 in Milwaukee. No one has yet said out loud what will happen if today’s disruptions continue to prevail by then.
The Republicans don’t convene until August 24 in Charlotte.
All of this to say that there is really no precedent for an American presidential election like this one. We cannot look to history for guidance.
Poll numbers as of today favor President Trump. An Axios-Harris poll taken last Friday show the president with a 55 percent overall approval rating and a 60 percent approval rating for his handling of the current crisis.
The power of incumbency is, today, working in his favor. He is in front of the American people every day, giving press conferences and briefings on the state of the coronavirus crisis.
But if the American economy continues to be effectively shut down, if millions of Americans are forced to remain stuck at home unable to work and earn a living, the irritation, anxiety and fear they currently feel will morph into desperation. What will happen then is anybody’s guess.