And In This Week... We Enter The Home Stretch
Irwin Stelzer
"Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." That's the message coming to Trump from pollsters (the Real Clear Politics average) and the more literary members of the team ensconced with Joe Biden in his basement redoubt. Biden leads in the national polls (+7.1) and in key states that swung to Trump in 2016 (Wisconsin +3.5, Pennsylvania +5.8, Florida +3.7). But although the polls favor Biden, several events seem to favour Trump.
Portland Alight. Photo from Williamette Week
The first such is a decline in COVID-19. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that COVID-19-like-illnesses and the percentage of positive tests "have continued to decrease nationally since mid-July." This will permit the pace of re-openings to increase, with occasional backtracking in the face of outbreaks. A New York Times tabulation shows that all fifty states have opened all or some of the businesses classified as retail stores, restaurants, hair salons and barber shops, houses of worship, cultural institutions, and even gyms, often with limitations on useable capacity. Those re-openings have most forecasts for the third quarter hovering around an annual growth rate of 20%, after a miserable second quarter (-33%). Goldman Sachs thinks 3Q growth will come in at a 25% rate, J.P.Morgan Asset Management believes the third quarter "could see a 25% q/q bounce" followed by a gradual recovery with the previous fourth-quarter 2019 peak not surpassed until the second half of 2021.
Trump could care less about the far-distant outlook for next year. He needs growth, now. And is likely to get it. Not only because the virus seems to be tapering off, but also because
The housing industry is recovering rapidly: existing home sales (+24.7% in July), new single-family home sales (+13.9%), housing starts (+22.6%), building permits (+18.8%);
the services and manufacturing sectors are expanding;
retail sales are up for three consecutive months, with vehicle sales leading the parade with a 11.3% rise in June.
"I expect more businesses to be able to operate and more of the economy to be able to run ... successfully in the second half of 2020," concludes James Bullard, president of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, and a member of the central bank's monetary policy committee. Such a successful run just now is the Democrats' nightmare: by stalling a new relief bill they deprive consumers of the spending power that would boost the economy, depriving Trump of his strongest argument - that as the man who created a robust economy before the virus struck, he is the man best able to lead its recovery.
Trump needs Bullard to be right - and two additional developments if he is to overcome Biden's lead. He might have been gifted the first of these - a Biden gaffe - when his challenger's handlers allowed him to be interviewed by ABC reporter David Muir, no teleprompter in sight. Asked what he would do if "the scientists say shut it [the country] down", Biden replied, "I would shut it down, I would listen to the scientists." The friendly interviewer did not think to ask Biden where in the Constitution he would locate the power to order such a shutdown.
An alarm bell went off in House speaker Nancy Pelosi's political mind, "I wouldn't legitimatize a conversation with him [Trump].... I don't think there should be any debates." Biden claims to be looking forward to the debates "as long as the [debate] commission continues down the straight and narrow...".
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, in an opinion piece headlined, "Biden's Loose Lips Could Sink His Chances" points out that "loose talk of nationwide shutdowns plays into the fears of voters .... Most economists believe a Biden shutdown would trigger a deep recession, enormous economic, social, psychic and health costs. Unnecessarily, in the view of many epidemiologists who favour a more measured response.
Age matters. Young is better than old. Non-profit Foundation for the Research on Equal Opportunity reports that nursing homes and assisted living facilities account for only 0.6% of the population but 42% of US Covid-19 deaths. We know that children are less susceptible to the disease. Events matter. We know that "super-spreader events" such as weddings, funerals and bar openings are hot spots. Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard's School of Public Health says that we should "Emphasize the reopening of the highest economic benefit, lowest risk endeavours." Grist for the Trump re-election mill: "We are aggressively sheltering those at highest risk, especially the elderly, allowing low-risk Americans to return to work and to school...", he said in his acceptance speech, like Biden, not mentioning from whence came his power to do as he claimed.
Finally, Trump, who styles himself a law-and-order President, likely benefits from continued rioting and looting in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, and the violence in New York (murders +34.6%, victims of gun violence up 95% this year through late August), Chicago (murders +51%, shootings +47%) and other cities. Trump certainly believes that: he hammered away at Biden's belated and what anti-Trump columnist George Will called "43-seconds of a tepid" response by Biden to the violence and looting, asking, "Is or is not Biden disgusted by mob violence in the service of political nihilism?" "No one will be safe in Biden's America," the President informed the crowd gathered at the White House, and promised "to give law enforcement, our police, back their power."
In reviving the "soft on crime" charge that Democrats so feared in the Obama-Biden years that they opposed criminal justice reform, the Trump team was intuiting what Omar Wasow, assistant professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, discovered from his analysis of data from past elections. He told an interviewer from The New Yorker magazine, "White moderates are part of the Democratic coalition as long as they perceive there to be order, but when they perceive there to be too much disorder they shift to the party that has owned the issue of order, which is the Republican Party."
So it ain't over until it's over, as the great Yankee sage once advised. A confluence of events - a tapering of the virus, an uptick in the economy, the flames burning in looted shops in several cities, and Biden's gift of gaffe - could give the Trump campaign a needed lift. Indeed, it seems to have gotten such a lift from the Republican convention: betting odds shifted dramatically towards the President after his acceptance speech. And Biden has announced that he will emerge from his basement and tour key states, something he dismissed as a possibility only a week ago.
But whatever bounce the President has received - if indeed there is one - just might not be enough to offset the President's inability to immobilize his twitter finger, his practice of taking dead aim at his foot and pulling the trigger, to the delight of a media eager to pounce.