Top Lines: US Economy And Trade Policy | 2020 Election And Political Analysis | Coronavirus Crisis | Impeachment | Protecting Our Elections And Disinformation | Immigration And The Border | Countering Illiberalism's Rise
Notes On 2020 - With the caveat that we think polling is going to be very noisy and volatile for some time, there is a growing body of evidence that the 2020 landscape is settling back to where it was prior to COVID - high single digit leads for the Democrats in the Presidential race and a Senate very much in play. We’ve always believed that once the public understood how much the President and his team blew the early COVID response, the public would not end up being kind to candidate Trump. We may be starting to see that now.
Let’s go through some numbers. The ABC/Ipsos tracker has Trump’s approval on handling COVID dropping from 55-43 (+12) in mid-March to 47-52 (-5) last week. The GSG/GBAO tracker has Party ID at 48 Dem/41 GOP (+ 7). FiveThirtyEight’s Congressional Generic shows the Dem advantage *growing* to 48.9-41.2 (+7.7), and it has Trump’s core fav/unfavs at -5.4 and trending in the wrong direction. A new Marquette University poll of all important WI has Biden up 48-45 over Trump. It was tied 46-46 in February, and Trump led Biden 47-44 in November. The most worrisome yikes! poll for the GOP right now has to be a new U of North Florida poll that has Biden beating Trump 46-40 in Florida and:
Trust Trump to give reliable COVID info: 41% yes, 58% no (-17%)
Trump approve/disapprove on coronavirus: 45-53% (-8%)
Our recurring point - most measures of the national election have Trump/GOP down by high single digits, with Trump often in the low 40s. This election feels like a 47-49 Biden, 40-42 Trump spread right now, with the Senate more likely to flip to the Dems than not.
Congress Needs To Step In, Force Trump To Forge A National Response To The Virus - Eleven weeks in and the US still lacks anything resembling a coherent plan to tame the virus, and the nation and its economy won’t stand back up until we do. As we’ve been writing for many weeks now, that plan should have four key elements:
1) Surge supplies/personnel to the front lines (fix the supply chain)
2) Stand up a national testing/isolation regime like the one in South Korea
3) Get serious about a national stay at home directive, social distancing
4) Launch a Manhattan Project for a vaccine/therapeutics/diagnostics/better PPE and equipment to fight COVID but to also prepare the country for the next pandemic
Perhaps the most shocking new development in the Administration’s historic and deadly fumbling of its response to COVID is its insistence that the federal government, with the CIA/IC, CDC, FDA, HHS/BARDA, DOD, and DHS/FEMA, is not in charge of the national response to the virus. Is the US government not in charge if a foreign military tries to invade? Or a hostile nation state launches a cyber-attack? If foreign terrorists strike the US? If there is a surge of migrants at the border? Or cartels flood communities with illegal drugs? A serial killer working across state lines? Hurricanes, earthquakes, or other extreme weather events? Or a recession - didn’t we just see an extraordinary mobilization of the federal government and Congress to fight our downward economic slide?
Why would it all of a sudden in a pandemic, in which our preparation would always have the US government leading a single coordinated response, somehow be different from all these other national threats? The answer of course is a pandemic isn’t different, but that we are witnessing perhaps the worst governing failure in American history and a hugely insulting effort to lie and deflect from it rather than do what the American people need and deserve.
NDN’s Weekly COVID Zoom Discussion W/Dr. Rob Shapiro And Simon Rosenberg Fridays At 2 PM - To help stay in touch with our community in these challenging times, NDN will be holding a weekly Zoom-based discussion with Simon and Rob. These talks will be Fridays from 2 to 2:45 pm. You can register for this Friday’s COVID discussion here, and be sure to read Rob’s latest take on what COVID means for the US economy in this new Washington Monthly piece.
More Work To Be Done On America's Economic Response To Coronavirus - NDN was pleased with the successful passage of a major economic rescue package by Congress last month. The bill takes important steps towards helping the millions of workers who have lost their jobs in this crisis, providing a bridge for businesses to cover their costs as their revenues have collapsed, funding state and local governments that have seen their deficits skyrocket, and providing a massive cash transfer program to boost the overall economy. However, this bill should only be seen as the first of many pieces of legislation to counter the crisis, and there is much more to get done if we are to ensure a v-shaped recovery once the virus itself is under control.
First, while this new level of spending by Congress (almost 10% of GDP) is unprecedented in modern American history, it is likely still too small considering the magnitude of the crisis. Goldman Sachs projects that growth will fall by an annualized 24% in Q2, while JP Morgan estimates a decline of 25%. To counter this enormous shock, Congress must be ready to authorize far more fiscal stimulus. Second, more must be done provide bridge loans to small and large businesses to help them maintain their fixed costs during the crisis and to maximize their ability to avoid layoffs. Many Western European countries have implemented programs in which the fiscal authorities subsidize the labor costs of struggling industries in return for those firms keeping their workers on payroll, and the US should do the same on a much larger scale than in the first stimulus bill to avoid mass unemployment in the first place. Finally, state and local governments have far less flexibility to run budget deficits than does the federal government, and similar to in 2008-09 many of these governments have already started cutting spending programs and laying off workers as their revenues have collapsed - actions that will only intensify the economic crisis. The federal government must step in here and provide hundreds of billions of dollars to state and local governments to ensure that critical safety net programs are maintained and that government workers keep their jobs.
For more on NDN's work on the economic consequences of coronavirus, click here. You can find new pieces on this subject by our long-time contributor Rob Shapiro in The Washington Post here and in The Washington Monthly here. Chris also published a new piece on how Congress should construct a massive fiscal stimulus, which you can find here.
Best,
Simon, Chris, and the rest of the NDN team
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