For the sake of a complete record when this election is at last, finally over, let’s have a rundown of events since we met last week.
In the wee, small hours of the morning last Friday we learned that President Trump tested positive for COVID-19. Later that day, he walked under his own steam to Marine One, which flew him to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was hospitalized for approximately 72 hours. According to briefings from his medical team, sometime during the day Friday, the president’s oxygen saturation had dropped to levels that were sufficiently concerning as to treat him in the hospital.
The president was put on a treatment regimen that included an experimental antibody cocktail being developed by the pharmaceutical company Regeneron. Doctors were sufficiently satisfied with the president’s condition that they released him to return to the White House on Monday.
Just prior to leaving Walter Reed, the president recorded a video to put on Twitter in which he said this about COVID-19:
Don’t let it dominate you. Don ‘t be afraid of it. You’re gonna beat it. We have the best medical equipment, we have the best medicines – all developed recently. And you’re gonna beat it.”
Top Democrats, for their part, did their best to appear respectful in light of the president’s diagnosis while at the same time making a bit of political hay. Here is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi:
We need to have trust. We have to trust that what they’re telling us about the president’s condition is real. Uh, we have to have confidence in the judgement of the doctors who are treating him that – when they give a presentation to the press, it has to be approved by the president. That’s not very scientific.”
Meanwhile, the campaign rolls on. We are three weeks and six days from election day and if you’re working in the Trump campaign, you have to be concerned about the polls.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal of registered voters taken just after the first debate shows Joe Biden with a whopping 14-point lead over President Trump. The fact that it’s registered voters rather than likely voters that were surveyed should be noted and taken into account. Surveys of registered voters have proven to be significantly less accurate.
The Real Clear Politics average of polls puts Biden on top 51 to 42, a nine point lead.
But a Gallup survey taken prior to the debate revealed that by a 56 to 40 percent margin, the majority of Americans believe that President Trump will win the election. Some pundits on the right have suggested that by virtue of the question allowing the respondent to avoid having to directly say who he or she will vote for – thus avoiding reluctance some Trump supporters may have for publicly revealing their opinion – a more accurate picture of voter sentiment is revealed.
As we all remember, the polls blew it big time in 2016. Trump supporters are counting on a repeat of that phenomenon in 2020.
As the president often says, we’ll see what happens.