The coronavirus pandemic has taken a wrecking ball to the Olympics, Edinburgh Festival and UN’s Cop26 climate conference.
In America, presidential primary elections have gone down like skittles, the Democratic national convention has been postponed and campaigns are frozen in time.
All of which raises the question: can the 2020 general election itself survive?The presidential vote is due to take place on 3 November. The date is set by federal law and Donald Trump has no power to delay it alone. That would require legislation enacted by Congress and signed by the president. Such an outcome still remains unthinkable to most. But many unthinkable events have unfolded in the last month.
“We’re in completely uncharted waters here and I don’t think anybody knows what’s going to happen,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York.
“By November the picture might be completely unrecognisable. We don’t even know if the election is going to happen as scheduled. There’s talk out there about postponing it or changing it to a mail-in only election.”
The profound uncertainty has upended political campaigns like nothing else in living memory. It was a month ago – 3 March – that the former vice-president Joe Biden won 10 states on Super Tuesday, the biggest day in the primary calendar, and took firm control of the Democratic race. Trump, meanwhile, was holding regular campaign rallies in packed arenas.
Now, Biden finds himself holed up in his basement in Wilmington, Delaware, struggling to break into the national conversation through TV interviews and virtual campaign events. Trump has been denied the lifeblood of rallies but switched to his other favourite medium – television – with daily coronavirus taskforce briefings from the White House. Polls suggest he is benefiting moderately from a “rally around the flag effect”.
Media coverage that would normally be all about the race for the White House is dominated instead by an extraordinary public health and economic crisis, with the US death toll from the virus expected to top 100,000. Trump and Biden continue to work on the assumption that, come November, the worst of the pandemic will be over. The US held midterm elections in 1918 even in the grip of the Spanish flu that killed 675,000 people nationwide.
What remains unknown is whether the pandemic will help or hurt Trump at the ballot box. He declared a national emergency on 13 March but has been fiercely condemned for previously downplaying the virus, squandering crucial weeks and leaving the country unprepared. The president has “has blood on his hands”, argued the Boston Globe editorial board this week, while Biden’s supporters say the former vice-president would bring precisely the stable leadership the country needs.
The PRRI says that, in less than three weeks, Trump has seen the highest increase in his favourability rating since the institute began tracking it in 2015. Its analysis of 1,008 adults polled between 17 and 22 March found that overall Trump’s favorability increased from 40% in February to 49% in March, with unfavorable opinion decreasing 10 points. Favourability in the battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin jumped 13 points.
Jones explained: “We’re seeing a typical American reaction at times of national crisis, a ‘rally around the flag effect’. It happened with George W Bush after 9/11 and Barack Obama after the killing of Osama bin Laden. But on this one, we’re looking at something different, the very front edge of the US finally taking this seriously.
Trump’s central re-election argument was the economy, but the coronavirus outbreak has caused the quickest collapse the US job market has ever seen, throwing 10 million people out of work in just two weeks, and destroyed countless businesses. Griffin said: “Economic shocks in an election year are about as bad as it could get in terms of timing for a president seeking re-election. How are the American people going to interpret the action of this administration?”
Trump’s critics believe that, pandemic or no pandemic, he was always doomed to defeat. Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “Trump was in trouble and I still think he is. As the autopsies go down on his handling of this, it’s not a good story.
“Trump does not have discipline and that has been the case all through his presidency. He does not take advice. He’s headstrong and he insists on what his gut tells him to do. He’s in a precarious position and I don’t think this pandemic changes it. If anything, it illustrates why he’s in that precarious position.”
Note EU-Digest: The November elections could be a major test as to the strength of US Democracy, because as the saying goes: "there's no telling what someone will do when they're pushed to the edge ".
Read More: The US presidential election is frozen in time – can it survive? | US news | The Guardian
In America, presidential primary elections have gone down like skittles, the Democratic national convention has been postponed and campaigns are frozen in time.
All of which raises the question: can the 2020 general election itself survive?The presidential vote is due to take place on 3 November. The date is set by federal law and Donald Trump has no power to delay it alone. That would require legislation enacted by Congress and signed by the president. Such an outcome still remains unthinkable to most. But many unthinkable events have unfolded in the last month.
“We’re in completely uncharted waters here and I don’t think anybody knows what’s going to happen,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York.
“By November the picture might be completely unrecognisable. We don’t even know if the election is going to happen as scheduled. There’s talk out there about postponing it or changing it to a mail-in only election.”
The profound uncertainty has upended political campaigns like nothing else in living memory. It was a month ago – 3 March – that the former vice-president Joe Biden won 10 states on Super Tuesday, the biggest day in the primary calendar, and took firm control of the Democratic race. Trump, meanwhile, was holding regular campaign rallies in packed arenas.
Now, Biden finds himself holed up in his basement in Wilmington, Delaware, struggling to break into the national conversation through TV interviews and virtual campaign events. Trump has been denied the lifeblood of rallies but switched to his other favourite medium – television – with daily coronavirus taskforce briefings from the White House. Polls suggest he is benefiting moderately from a “rally around the flag effect”.
Media coverage that would normally be all about the race for the White House is dominated instead by an extraordinary public health and economic crisis, with the US death toll from the virus expected to top 100,000. Trump and Biden continue to work on the assumption that, come November, the worst of the pandemic will be over. The US held midterm elections in 1918 even in the grip of the Spanish flu that killed 675,000 people nationwide.
What remains unknown is whether the pandemic will help or hurt Trump at the ballot box. He declared a national emergency on 13 March but has been fiercely condemned for previously downplaying the virus, squandering crucial weeks and leaving the country unprepared. The president has “has blood on his hands”, argued the Boston Globe editorial board this week, while Biden’s supporters say the former vice-president would bring precisely the stable leadership the country needs.
The PRRI says that, in less than three weeks, Trump has seen the highest increase in his favourability rating since the institute began tracking it in 2015. Its analysis of 1,008 adults polled between 17 and 22 March found that overall Trump’s favorability increased from 40% in February to 49% in March, with unfavorable opinion decreasing 10 points. Favourability in the battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin jumped 13 points.
Jones explained: “We’re seeing a typical American reaction at times of national crisis, a ‘rally around the flag effect’. It happened with George W Bush after 9/11 and Barack Obama after the killing of Osama bin Laden. But on this one, we’re looking at something different, the very front edge of the US finally taking this seriously.
Trump’s central re-election argument was the economy, but the coronavirus outbreak has caused the quickest collapse the US job market has ever seen, throwing 10 million people out of work in just two weeks, and destroyed countless businesses. Griffin said: “Economic shocks in an election year are about as bad as it could get in terms of timing for a president seeking re-election. How are the American people going to interpret the action of this administration?”
Trump’s critics believe that, pandemic or no pandemic, he was always doomed to defeat. Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “Trump was in trouble and I still think he is. As the autopsies go down on his handling of this, it’s not a good story.
“Trump does not have discipline and that has been the case all through his presidency. He does not take advice. He’s headstrong and he insists on what his gut tells him to do. He’s in a precarious position and I don’t think this pandemic changes it. If anything, it illustrates why he’s in that precarious position.”
Note EU-Digest: The November elections could be a major test as to the strength of US Democracy, because as the saying goes: "there's no telling what someone will do when they're pushed to the edge ".
Read More: The US presidential election is frozen in time – can it survive? | US news | The Guardian
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