welcome to Surveillance survey, our weekly look at polling data and research surveys on the candidates, voters, and issues that will shape the 2020 elections.
The Trump administration engages in a not-so-quiet whisper campaign to cast doubt on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, and other public health officials.
President Trump’s team has increasingly questioned Dr. Fauci’s record, and this week the White House moved to strip the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of control over collecting data on the spread of the coronavirus.
All of this aligns with Trump’s attempts to speed up the reopening process, often despite warnings from his health advisers. Presumably, Trump is playing a long game, hoping that a return to normality will bring the booming economy in time for the November election and that the virus could “disappear” or be prevented by a vaccine.
But none of those things has happened so far, and when it comes to public opinion, the president seems to have cornered.
After gradually declining throughout most of spring, cases have steadily increased over the past month, giving pollsters plenty of time to read how Americans have responded to the resurgence of the virus.
Most people still prefer a prudent reopening, and increasingly disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic. When it comes to the health experts who have been vilifying, people’s faith has hardly been shaken.
Voters in general (but are no longer Republicans) have faith in Fauci.
As Trump and his allies in the conservative media have cast doubt on Dr. Fauci, many Republicans have turned against the doctor. In May, a CNN poll found that by a two-to-one margin, Republicans said they trusted the information Dr. Fauci was providing. But on Wednesday, Quinnipiac University released a poll showing that 52 percent of Republicans now said they did not trust Dr. Fauci in the pandemic. Only 39 percent said yes.
However, among Democrats and independents, trust in Dr. Fauci had increased, if at all. Eighty-six percent of Democrats and two-thirds of independents told Quinnipiac investigators that they had faith in the information that Dr. Fauci provided. Overall, 65 percent of the country continued to say they had faith in Dr. Fauci, according to the survey.
Surprisingly, the survey found that Dr. Fauci was trusted by a majority even on some of Mr. Trump’s top demographics: White Americans with no college degrees (59 percent), people living in rural areas (55 percent) ) and white men (61 percent)
Meanwhile, the president was in bad shape here: In each of those groups, less than half of those surveyed said they trusted him to provide information about the virus. It is further evidence that even as Trump continues to command the faithful in the Republican Party, his handling of the virus may be reducing support for him, and possibly the party, among certain vital demographic groups.
This has also put Republicans in trouble. Caught between Trump’s calls to reopen and the overwhelming desire of the public to exercise caution, relatively few congressional Republicans who are seeking competitive elections in November have placed the virus at the center of their campaigns. However, most voters call the pandemic a critically important issue for the election of their candidates.
Trump’s numbers have dropped even with the major groups.
Even for self-identified Republicans, who continue to express overwhelming approval of Trump’s performance, confidence in his handling of the pandemic has been shaken. His approval rating specifically on the virus fell below 80 percent among Republicans in both the Quinnipiac poll and the ABC News / Ipsos poll last week.
Only 51 percent of white voters without a college degree told Quinnipiac interviewers that they approved of their overall job performance, compared to 60 percent a month ago. Among white evangelicals, Mr. Trump’s job performance approval had dropped to 70 percent, a drop of 10 percentage points from a May Quinnipiac poll.
By a 14-point margin, voters said in a CNBC poll last month that they believed Joseph R. Biden Jr., the alleged Democratic presidential candidate, would do a better job of managing the pandemic than Trump.
Americans are reluctant to reopen schools and support masks.
With coronavirus cases on the rise in most states, Trump has not articulated a clear national framework for dealing with the disease. Antibody and virus testing, which often calls central to the administration’s strategy, has recently begun taking weeks to produce results in many cases. Even when he pushes for schools to reopen, he has refused to issue a national plan on how to do it safely.
On Thursday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said “science should not hinder” the reopening of schools.
But in a survey conducted late last month, Ipsos found that 71 percent of American parents thought it would be risky to send their children to school. And most parents said that if their state experienced a second wave of the virus in the fall, they would likely keep their children at home.
On the broader issue of reopening, most of the country remains firmly against Trump’s aggressive push. About three in five respondents to last week’s ABC / Ipsos poll said the country was reopening too quickly; only 15 percent said it was moving too slow.
Several states have ordered residents to wear masks in public, including Arkansas and Colorado, which announced mandates to wear masks on Thursday. Trump has unveiled his ambivalence about the masks, but this week’s Quinnipiac poll found that 71 percent of Americans would support a national mandate.
Seventy-three percent said Trump himself should wear a mask when in public.
