Can Trump save his re-election campaign with 3.5 months left?
I don't think there is enough time for things to change before election day. Here are some of the things that are unlikely to change:
1. High unemployment above 10%
2. decline in quarterly GDP confirming a recession.
3. Increasing number of Americans dying from Covid-19
4. The closing down of more business as the virus spreads further and deeper into the American population.
5. The fact that Trump was impeached by the House Of Representatives for trying to blackmail Ukraine by withholding weapons in order to dig dirt up on Biden.
6. Trump's record of collusion/support/friendship with Putin of Russia.
7. Trump's average approval rating in the Gallup poll which is at 40%, the lowest of any President in history. This average is based on all the Gallup polls taken since he came into office in January 2017. With just 3.5 months left, you might have maybe 8 more polls done at most. Not nearly enough to move his average from 40% at all.
1. There's approximately 0 percent of Trump's voter base that blames him for the spike in unemployment that happened when we shut down the economy over covid. If you're seeing polls telling you otherwise, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that they're about as accurate as the polls leading up to 2016.
2. Again, economic shutdown is the obvious cause. The only people faulting Trump for this year's economic decline are people that already weren't going to vote for him.
3. Only folks who are already anti-Trump are blaming him for the covid resurgence. Even if you buy into the idea that he ought to have known a couple weeks earlier and taken action THEN, the fact that the numbers have dropped and then gone up again indicates that any failures manifesting now are the result of actions taken or not taken AFTER the virus had been established here in the US. That would be on the governers, as they and the media explained back in April that the president doesn't have the authority to dictate whether their economies reopen or not. Also, most potential Trump voters that I've spoken to, including several who were staunchly anti-Trump back in '16, don't buy the idea that several months of far left protests in virtually every major city are blameless in this secondary peak.
4. The business closures aren't a function of the virus's spread. The business closures are a function of the governers' perception of the virus's spread. There is a difference. Democrat governers, despite being heralded as wise heroes the hardline left, are merely human, which means that their opinions are simply opinions, and not divinely inspired compasses attuned to the magnetic pole of objective truth. Most of Trump's supporters, at least from what I've seen, understand this.
5. The impeachment, all said and done, didn't sway a SINGLE 2016 Trump voter that I've spoken to, to change their mind about voting for him. Unfortunately for the political motives behind the Russia narrative, in the end the divide was simple: If you were someone who went into the Russia story hating Trump, you ended up believing the narrative. If you were someone who went into the Russia story supporting Trump, you didn't believe it. In the early days of the trial, his numbers took a hit, but by the end of it, even these lefty push polls had the Donald's approval balancing right back out to where it had been at the onset.
6. Maybe, to you, this is a significantly different point than the one you made in #5. From where I'm sitting, however, the one answer covers both. If you already hated Trump, you probably believe the collusion narrative. If you supported him, you probably don't. Most people who aren't charged one way or the other on Trump probably don't even know the details that came out in the trial. I'm pretty sure that banking on momentum from impeachment to help Biden is some seriously wishful thinking. You'll have a better shot of convincing everybody that this recession is a function of Trump's fiscal policies and not the state-by-state covid shutdowns.
7. These polls are all based on prior election models. Twitter, Facebook, etc. are new enough that we haven't nearly quantified their effect on public discourse and opinion, and not only is Donald Trump more controversial than any other president we've had in 40 years, the coalition that supports him is proportioned, particularly in regard to race/ethnicity, unlike the support base of any other republican or conservative federal candidate since at least the '80's. Acting like these old polling models are a valid basis to confidently say that Trump is not only definitively behind, but to a degree that might be impossible to fix in 3 1/2 months (a veritable eternity in US presidential politics) is straight up hubris.
