We have said many times in covering presidential elections that events set the agenda. To illustrate that point, let’s jump in the Wayback Machine and dial it in for March 18 of this year.
Joe Biden had just won big in Democratic primaries over the two previous weeks – including the Super Tuesday win in South Carolina that rescued his 2020 campaign from the ash heap of history.
Bernie Sanders, who left New Hampshire as the frontrunner, suddenly found himself facing, as we expressed it then, “daunting math.”
But so also, we said, was Donald Trump. The coronavirus pandemic was taking hold and taking with it the red-hot U.S. economy that would otherwise make an incumbent president very hard to beat.
As we said on March 18:
His [Trump’s] biggest advantage – his insurmountable advantage many on both sides said – was the robust American economy. That advantage – at least for now and for who knows how long – is gone. American economic activity is grinding to a halt. Mass layoffs are underway. The airline, hotel, restaurant and entertainment industries are in particularly deep trouble. The 28 percent selloff in the stock market has hammered retirement savings for millions of Americans who were, prior to the virus outbreak, feeling pretty good about themselves.
None of that helps an incumbent.”
Democrats suddenly had reason to believe that they were back in the game. Polls taken over the spring and summer showed Joe Biden with a double-digit lead over President Trump.
Then, on May 26, George Floyd, an African American, was killed while in police custody in Minneapolis. Civil unrest broke out in that city and soon spread to other major cities. At this writing, Portland, Oregon has suffered riots, looting and general mayhem for the past 97 consecutive days.
Democrats appeared to believe that the combined negative impact of civil unrest in major cities and the fallout from shutting down the economy due to COVID would all work to the disadvantage of Donald Trump. And for a time, polls seemed to support that belief.
In keeping with that belief, no one in the Democratic Party spoke out against the ongoing violence in cities like Portland, Seattle, Chicago and others. Not a word on the subject was spoken at the Democratic National Convention.
That strategy may have backfired on the Democrats. At a campaign event last Friday in Manchester, New Hampshire, the president said:
A weak guy like Joe Biden didn’t even bring law and order up as a subject for discussion in the entire Democrat National Convention. Now they’re all of a sudden – now they realize because they’ve gone down like a rock in water – they’ve gone down in the polls and now all of a sudden they’re talking, ‘oh, we have to talk about crime.”
Indeed, polls have tightened. Some of them now have the race as a tossup – in the battleground states.
The economy was to have been Donald Trump’s ticket to reelection. Now, if he is to win, his ticket could be the desire held by heartland voters to have order in the streets.