Any normal president in the middle of a pandemic would seek to unify the nation through ostentatiously strong leadership. That isn’t in Donald Trump’s playbook. He thinks that his unique combination of swagger, scapegoating, angry populism, and support for the red team in the culture war will be enough to carry him to another narrow victory. It is an approach based on division, not unity. Can it work?
Based on the results of the 2016 and 2018 elections and three years of polls, he has no realistic chance of winning the popular vote. He doesn’t care how many votes he wins, however, as long as they are the right ones. If he can pull off narrow victories in all of the blue firewall states, his built-in advantage in the Electoral College will carry him to a win regardless of the outcome of the popular vote.
To me, the key is going to be vote suppression. If Trump can reduce the Biden vote substantially through effective negative campaigning, virus-related restrictions, or the threat of violence, he has a decent chance regardless of the state of the economy. Otherwise, this ain’t 2016, and all of his anti-China commercials aren’t going to persuade people who are unemployed or feel threatened by the virus to give him a second chance.