The death toll continues to rise as COVID-19 unleashes itself in Florida, Arizona and other campaign battlefields, but the television ads President Trump is broadcasting in those states say nothing about the coronavirus pandemic that has changed the lives of all Americans.
It is a conspicuous omission.
Almost every day, states that could decide the November 3 elections break new records of illness and death. Nationwide, the virus has killed 140,000 people. However, the $ 30 million in television commercials Trump has released so far this month in his bid for a second term evade the issue of how he is running the country through one of the worst calamities a president has faced. modern.
Instead, Trump’s ads falsely accuse his Democratic rival Joe Biden of trying to strip the police. They claim that the former vice president would endanger children by allowing violent crimes to break out in cities overrun by protesters who tear down shops and set buildings on fire. They suggest that Biden, a moderate US senator for 36 years, would bow to “the radical left-wing mafia.”
It is not unusual for a troubled headline to try to divert attention from tough times or define an opponent in negative terms, said Erika Franklin Fowler, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads. But the epic scale of the pandemic’s damage to the nation makes it almost impossible to avoid, he said.
“It becomes increasingly strange that I can’t find a way to talk about what he’s doing about it,” he said.
Trump’s exclusion of the coronavirus from his advertising comes when polls show that most Americans disapprove of his response to the pandemic. For months, Trump has played down the threat to health while fueling racism with incendiary comments about Confederate monuments and Black Lives Matter protests.
Historian David M. Kennedy sees parallels with those of President Herbert Hoover He struggles when he ran for reelection in 1932 after the Great Depression exploded on his watch, paving the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt to take him down.
“You don’t want to draw attention to the whole egg on your face,” said Kennedy, the author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War.”
“Examples from other countries that have more successfully tackled this issue tell us that a different kind of leadership could have done better, and historians will try to discover why Trump has been so inept at this particular crisis.”
In May and early June, Trump ran television commercials saying he had taken swift action on vaccines, treatments and tests and “saved countless lives” by banning travelers from China and Europe. In the six weeks since it stopped executing them, the US has reported 32,000 more deaths from COVID-19 and 1.9 million new cases of coronavirus, even when many other affected countries have tamed the spread of the virus and reopened safe.
The importance of television commercials in presidential races has waned as social media has become a primary source of information for voters. But campaigns continue to spend heavily on television commercials, and advertising patterns remain one of the best public indicators of their strategy.
During the first three weeks of July, Trump spent $ 19 million to advertise in states he narrowly earned in 2016: Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad-tracking firm.
Nearly all of the $ 13 million Biden spent on television commercials during the same period went to those same six states.
The president’s campaign has also invested $ 5 million in Georgia, Ohio and Iowa, he claims Trump took a wider margin but now appears to be within Biden’s reach.
The recent increase in COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations in Florida, Arizona, Georgia and Texas is jeopardizing Trump’s position in those states, said Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.
“I think he is helping to put those states on the line because of a lack of confidence in his leadership on that issue,” he said, “and he is not saying or doing anything right now that could change that perception.”
In Florida, more than 5,000 people have died, nearly 337,000 have been infected, and hospitals are full of critically ill patients.
In Arizona, where the Phoenix morgues are nearly full, coroners are deploying refrigerated trucks to store bodies. The state’s positive test rate for coronavirus, nearly one in four, is the highest in the nation.
Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas are run by Republican governors who, at Trump’s urging, delayed the closing of businesses, quickly reopened, and were then forced to withdraw when the contagion exploded.
Trump, who had planned to run for reelection in a strong economy, has pressured states to reopen in defiance of public health guidelines. A Fox News poll released Sunday found that voters no longer viewed Trump as stronger than Biden in the economy.
Supporters of President Trump at his June 20 rally in Tulsa, Okla.
(Sue Ogrocki / Associated Press)
Declining voter confidence in Trump has pushed the president’s poll ratings down. A staggering 69% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track, and 56% disapprove of Trump’s job performance, according to public poll aggregates from RealClear Politics.
A Washington Post / ABC News poll last week found that 60% of voters disapproved of Trump’s leadership in the pandemic. Multiple polls have shown a drop in support among a key group that favored it in 2016: people over 65, a group highly vulnerable to COVID-19.
Beyond his ads showing the mayhem on the streets below Biden, Trump has also run through the places blaming his opponent for the loss of jobs at U.S. factories in China.
Another Trump announcement suggests that Biden, 77, is becoming senile. He describes it as “clearly diminished” and shows him stumbling to find his words. “Joe Biden does not have the strength, endurance, and mental fortitude to lead this country,” says one narrator.
That line of attack runs the risk of failing the 74-year-old president, said Susan MacManus, a veteran political scientist at the University of South Florida.
“Trump must be careful,” he said. “Trump thinks everyone thinks he is energetic and lively and does not have these cognitive issues. But is that true?
A recent poll from Monmouth University found that voters, 52% to 45%, were more certain that Biden had the mental and physical stamina to be president. Trump sometimes has trouble pronouncing words and recently used two hands to bring a glass of water to his lips. His slow pace walking down a ramp at a West Point graduation last month led critics to question his health. Trump blamed slippery shoes.
Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said Americans already understood how hard the president had worked to keep the country safe during the pandemic, but that they needed to know more about Biden, so it made sense to stick with the announcements. scorching.
For his part, Biden has rushed places that represent him as a force for stability after the turmoil of Trump’s racially divisive presidency. The country is crying out for “leadership that unites us,” he says in a place with images of him and of American workers in masks. Trump, who has mocked Biden for campaigning with a mask, has worn it publicly only once.
Priorities USA Action, a super PAC that publishes ads on behalf of Biden, has issued ads criticizing Trump for letting the pandemic spiral spiral out of control. The group’s president, Guy Cecil, said it was not surprising that Trump was avoiding the issue in his ads.
“I think it will be very difficult to make this choice on anything other than the failure of the Trump administration to deal with the coronavirus,” he said.
Abramowitz, the political scientist, believes many voters are concerned about Trump’s disdain for public health experts, his rush to reopen schools and businesses, and his protests of crowds sitting shoulder to shoulder without masks.
“All I see him say or do is just reinforce this perception that he is not capable of dealing with this,” he said. “And it is obviously the most important challenge facing the country right now.”
