Reporter Columnist
How will President Donald J. Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis impact the race? Will the pandemic affect turnout? How effectively will election officials process the expected surge in mail-in ballots? How long will it take to count votes and announce a definitive victor? A week? A month? After the New Year? Who knows?!
With three weeks left before Election Day, we know nothing. Literally nothing. Yes, that means you, me, the media, and candidates themselves. We all pretend to have answers but come on, man (h/t Joe Biden), Nostradamus we are not (and Nostradamus he was not).
Political events no longer follow a predictable cause and effect formulation. Machiavellian plotting is for naught (just ask Nancy Pelosi, who tried to squash Bernie Sanders’ Iowa momentum by chaining him to his Senate desk during the impeachment trial) and all the norms of public life have been erased from our memories as if we are Tommy Lee Jones and the universe is Will Smith.
In an age of data, analytics and information, where computers and algorithms are supposed to predict the future, we instead live in an Age of Improvisation where humans know nothing of what is on tap for tomorrow and are forced to roll with the punches. All the imagination one can muster is no match for the shocking and unexpected cosmic occurrences coming after the next commercial break.
For example, we have no idea if Americans will eventually rally around the flag as conventional wisdom dictates or if they will punish a sick, but improving, commander-in-chief for not wrestling the virus as effectively as he wrestled Vince McMahon on WrestleMania.
Sure, Trump’s polling bumped up slightly in the early weeks of the pandemic, but unlike moments of sustained unity such as George H.W. Bush’s 89 percent approval rating following the ouster of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait or his son’s 90 percent level of support in the days after September 11, 2001, Trump’s numbers cratered suddenly and almost in concert with his appearances at the daily coronavirus news briefing.
How could this be? Conventional wisdom tells us that the more exposure to a person, place or thing, the more likely a customer or voter is to feel a sense of loyalty to the product or candidate. McDonalds whets the appetite of millions with mouth-watering advertisements for its most popular product – the Big Mac – on the daily even with universal recognition. But there’s someone to whom conventional wisdom does not conform.
As Trump’s airtime climbed north, his polling fell further south. Sound familiar?
We know from the surveying debacle of 2016 that Trump’s support can be suppressed in conventional polling. Pro-Trump respondents are not always willing to spill their guts to pollsters. Plus, the struggle with modelling a representative sampling of the American electorate remains a moving target. Trump voters cannot be placed into a single ideological, demographic or geographic box.
Never mind that Trump has always played a game of chicken with the concept of diminishing returns – at least in the conventional sense. He is simultaneously everywhere. No channel is immune to the cultural and political phenomenon that follows you like optical art. Turn on the news and he’s lobbing insults at Pelosi. Flip the channel and he’s making a cameo in Home Alone 2. I even swear to have seen his image in my soup.
The threat of over-exposure and unreliable polling aside, Trump’s re-election campaign already faced historical and conventional headwinds long before coronavirus stamped its visa at American border checkpoints.
Never in the history of the United States – and this is no exaggeration – have four presidents been re-elected back-to-back-to-back-to-back. As I wrote in a CNN.com article in October 2015, the Jefferson-Madison-Monroe and Clinton-Bush-Obama hat tricks are the closest our nation has been to an unbroken trend of four two-term presidents. So can Trump, in 2020 as he did in 2016, turn the tables on conventional wisdom again?
Under the rules of old, a wise strategist could guide the political plains with the ease of a Jedi. That was then, this is now. Nothing matters anymore. Predictions are wrong. Studies are debunked. Experts whiff.
“The future is unwritten, and anyone who tells you they know what is going to happen is wrong. We are in utterly uncharted territory,” MSNBC primetime host Chris Hayes said on his program the night Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away.
What he meant to say is: We’re all making this up as we go along.
Pete Seat is a former White House spokesman for President George W. Bush and campaign spokesman for former Director of National Intelligence and U.S. Senator Dan Coats. Currently he is a vice president with Bose Public Affairs Group in Indianapolis. He is also an Atlantic Council Millennium Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations Term Member and author of “The War on Millennials.”