The good folk at Power Line are, with good reason, quite fond of the somewhat misnamed Claremont Review of Books. “Misnamed” in the sense that it does more than review books.
Today they link to a non-book review article by senior editor William Voegeli. With a fine sense of irony and snark, he titles his look at the 2020 election “You’re Fired” after the tag line from Trump’s ‘reality’ TV show The Apprentice.
Baseball hall-of-famer Vernon “Lefty” Gomez often said, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” The Occam’s Razor interpretation of the 2020 presidential election is that President Donald Trump was neither lucky nor good enough a politician to secure a second term.
The Great Depression obliterated Hoover’s popularity, while the Great Pandemic left Trump’s in basically the same place where he began.
Evidence does not prove but does support a two-part theory about 2020. First, the pandemic was damaging to Trump’s re-election chances, but not decisive in itself. (snip) Second, however, the pandemic combined with Trump’s chronic unpopularity was too much to overcome on Election Day. Trump never amassed the reservoir of good will, of people who remained skeptical but were willing to extend him the benefit of the doubt, for his campaign to withstand an exogenous jolt like COVID. Having won his first presidential election because an imposingly large number of contingencies had broken just right, Trump was left with only one path to re-election: running the table again. That proved to be far too hopeful.
[Trump] committed the classic gambler’s mistake of interpreting a hot streak as proof of his own infallible judgment.
In the Real Clear Politics average, Trump’s approval rating as voters went to the polls on Election Day was 45.9%. The final numbers showed that he received 46.9% of the vote, an indication that nearly everyone who approved of him voted for him, but almost no one else did. Trump could have won despite engendering strong opposition if his base had been larger. Or, he could have won if a significant number of voters outside his base had chosen him as the less bad option. What he could not do was win with the base he had and the aversion to him from nearly everyone else.
Is Voegeli correct? We will need the hindsight provided by the passage of time to make that determination. In the meantime, he provides a fair approximation of what the eventual verdict might be.
My own assessment: The U.S. presidency has two main jobs, getting stuff done and being the national figurehead. Trump did okay at “getting stuff done” but for a majority of Americans he did not consistently pull off the figurehead role. To use a British analogy, he got a B+/A- on the Boris Johnson part of the job, but only a C on the Queen Elizabeth part.
