Breaking news: President Trump said overnight that he and the first lady had tested positive for the coronavirus. Here’s the latest. It’s Friday, and this is your politics tip sheet. |
- President Trump announced early this morning on Twitter that he and the first lady had tested positive for the coronavirus, upending the presidential race after months in which the president had downplayed the virus’s threat.
- “Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19,” Trump tweeted just before 1 a.m. “We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!”
- Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, issued a statement shortly after saying that the president and his wife, Melania, were “both well,” and would stay at the White House as they fought the virus. “Rest assured I expect the president to continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering, and I will keep you updated on any future developments,” Conley wrote.
- Trump privately acknowledged as early as February that the virus was “deadly stuff” and was far more dangerous than the flu, as revealed by the journalist Bob Woodward in his recent book.
- But publicly Trump has consistently minimized the virus, and his devotion to denial has largely dictated his policy response: He has declined to coordinate an overarching federal strategy, while urging businesses and schools to return to in-person operations as quickly as possible.
- At a political dinner yesterday raising money for Catholic charities, he told the audience that “the end of the pandemic is in sight, and next year will be one of the greatest years in the history of our country.”
- The Trumps’ positive tests came after one of the president’s closest advisers, Hope Hicks, became infected with the virus. Other White House aides declined to share with The Times whether Trump was experiencing symptoms. People around him had noticed that his voice sounded raspy yesterday, but it was unclear if that was abnormal since he has spoken often at rallies recently.
- How will this news affect the presidential race? That depends largely on how his illness runs its course. But it seems destined to shake things up significantly.
- At the very least, the president — who had planned to visit Wisconsin for rallies this weekend — will have to ditch the campaign trail for as long as he needs to recover. Convalescence from the coronavirus can take anywhere from two weeks to well over a month.
- Wisconsin was recently labeled a “red zone” state by the White House’s coronavirus task force; Trump’s plan to hold rallies there was only the latest example of his willingness to flout the social-distancing guidelines of his own health experts.
- Trump has consistently questioned the health advice of top scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and on the coronavirus task force. He has refused to wear a mask in public on all but a few occasions, and has publicly mocked his opponent, Joe Biden, for wearing one.
- At 74, Trump belongs to an age group at risk to the virus. He also has a common form of heart disease, and weighs in at over 240 pounds, which is considered obese for his height. Even as he played down the virus’s dangers in Dayton, Ohio, last week, he acknowledged, “It affects elderly people, elderly people with heart problems.”
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Before his positive coronavirus test, Trump was slipping in Ohio. |
No Republican has ever won a presidential election without taking Ohio, and Mr. Trump carried it with ease in 2016, performing strongly with white voters in almost every demographic. |
If he doesn’t capture the state in November, it’s hard to see him winning the election — but the polling picture looks more worrisome for him this time around. |
In a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, Mr. Biden had a statistically insignificant edge of one percentage point on the president, while a survey released the same day by Fox News put Mr. Biden ahead by five points. |
After the president said early Friday morning that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, the future of the race was thrown even further into doubt. But Ohio’s bellwether status remains a dependable fact of political life. |
“If he doesn’t win Ohio, it’s over,” David Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Akron, said in an interview. He noted that Mr. Trump had traveled to Ohio several times last month, holding rallies in white, working-class areas in a tacit acknowledgment of how badly he’ll need the state in order to eke out an Electoral College victory. |
“If you think about it, why the heck is he spending any time in Ohio in September, in a state that he won by over eight points?” Dr. Cohen said. “The only answer is that he and his campaign know that he’s in trouble.” |
Four years ago, Mr. Trump built a particularly balanced coalition among Ohio’s white voters, winning across education levels. But his support in the state has waned over the past four years, particularly in the suburbs. |
In the process, white voters in Ohio have become about as heavily divided along educational lines as they are in the rest of the country. It is evidence, from a conservative Midwestern stronghold where most state offices are consistently held by Republicans, that Mr. Trump’s divisive brand of politics has been more effective at sifting voters out of his coalition than at bringing them in. |
In 2016, exit polls showed that Hillary Clinton actually did better among non-college white voters in Ohio than she did nationally, reflective of a longstanding blue-collar Democratic tradition in parts of the state. Among white voters with college degrees, meanwhile, the opposite was true: She underperformed especially badly in Ohio, where staunch white-collar conservatism is a long-held custom. |
The result is that Mr. Trump did almost as well among white people with a degree in Ohio — who deeply distrusted Mrs. Clinton — as he did among those without a college education. |
But this has all changed. Averaging together the recent Fox and Quinnipiac polls, Mr. Trump was running 12 points behind his 2016 totals among white voters with degrees. As a result, while exit polls four years ago showed Mr. Trump winning the suburbs in Ohio by 20 points — leagues better than his support in suburbs elsewhere in the country — the Fox poll last week put him 10 points behind Mr. Biden in the state's suburbs. |
“Trump’s support has peaked, and particularly in the suburbs, people are turning toward Biden,” Thomas Sutton, the director of the Community Research Institute at Baldwin Wallace University outside Cleveland, said in an interview. “Some of them were Obama voters before that; some of them are dyed-in-the-wool Republican types. And in both cases, they’ve had enough of Trump, is what they say.” |
While the president maintains a commanding lead among rural voters, recent polling has put him more than 10 points behind his 2016 numbers with this group. Dr. Cohen said that Mr. Trump had also worn on the patience of some in these areas, after making great promises to them in 2016. |
“When he came to Ohio and told people to not sell their houses, that he was going to bring all their jobs back — and he clearly hasn’t — people pay attention,” Dr. Cohen said. “The people that worked at that G.M. Lordstown plant, they know the jobs haven’t come back,” he added, referring to a General Motors factory whose abrupt closure in 2018 Mr. Biden has sought to exploit on the campaign trail. |
Ohio has been conducting no-excuse absentee voting in statewide elections for over a decade and is offering a range of early-voting options this year. Other than a legal dispute over how many early-voting drop boxes to allow in each county, there have not been many high-profile examples of legal challenges to ballot access. |
According to the Fox poll, just 42 percent of voters said they would vote in person on Election Day. About the same number planned to vote by mail. Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to say they would vote by mail, the poll found. |
Ohio allows election officials to open and scan absentee ballots before Election Day, contacting voters whose ballots have errors so that they can fix them and preparing the ballots to be counted at polling places. As soon as polls close at 7:30 p.m., those ballots can be counted. |
Therefore, unlike in other key states that wait longer to count mail-in ballots, it’s possible that in Ohio, votes cast by mail — which are likely to be more heavily Democratic than others — will be among the first to be counted. |
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