This is exactly how covid-19 costs Trump voters

Voters punish the president when people around them die under his watch

In Wednesday’s post on the election—the first in series updating subscribers on the conditions of the 2020 race—I wrote about what polls and forecasting models have to say about Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House. The answer was that Trump is an underdog with maybe half the chance of winning that he had on this day in 2016. It would take both a large reversion in the trends of the campaign and a sizable polling error for him to turn around his flailing campaign.

This sort of horse race journalism only gets us so far, though. Today I want to lean on public polls and begin ask the question of why Donald Trump is so far behind Joe Biden in the polls? What, exactly, makes him so unpopular? And to which voters?

There are several primary reasons for Trump’s deficit.

The first, and most obvious, is his abject failure to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. That is the one I will write about today. We will discuss other causes—like unrest in the cities and psycholog…