All around the world, political leaders are receiving significant approval bumps during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But, as I explore in my new article in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, this is not the case for Trump.
The article has sparked extensive discussion on the reasons why Trump hasn’t experienced an approval surge and most readers attribute an “incompetent response” as the primary, if not only, reason. Another argument is that voters are viewing the crisis through a domestic lens rather than as a “wartime” foreign policy crisis situation.
I disagree with this reasoning, and as I explain below, social science can help us understand the broader structural factors impacting Trump’s approval numbers.
There is indeed a wide gap between the approval surges between different leaders. A few examples include:
Italian Prime Minister Conte (71 percent — +27 points)
Austrian Chancellor Kurz (77 percent — +33 points)
Dutch Prime Minister Rutte (75 percent — +30 points)
Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen (79 percent — +40 points)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel (79 percent — +11 points)
French President Emmanuel Macron (51 percent — +15 points)
By comparison, Trump has only managed a minuscule two-point bump as of today’s FiveThirtyEight polling aggregate. Why is that?
In part, that’s a symptom of an increasingly polarized U.S. society. Gallup, for example, finds that Trump has the largest partisan gulf, the gap between how Republican and Democratic voters rate him, for a president in U.S. history. And in October, Pew Research found that members of the two parties are deepening their animosity toward one another, “including negative sentiments among partisans toward the members of the opposing party.”
This polarization has been notably reinforced by Trump throughout his presidency including during the COVID-19 crisis in contrast to the European situation.
This divisive tribalism isn’t being seen in Europe; it’s harder to polarize and encourage absolute antipathy in multiparty systems where parties often must form coalitions to govern. In Germany, Sweden and Norway, for example, party polarization has steadily decreased over several decades…
As noted above, one of the most frequent criticisms of the article is that, rather than U.S. party polarization, a much simpler explanation is suffice:
Trump is performing relatively poorly because his response has been inept, incompetent, and overly partisan.
Trump’s approval stasis, no doubt, has been compounded by his early downplaying of the coronavirus, inconsistent messaging, and divisive tone.
But it is too easy to fall into the trap of hastily drawing the conclusion that his response is what has mattered most of all.
Would Trump’s approval surge have indeed been significantly greater if he had developed a more consistent and less partisan response?
Perhaps…but recent U.S. political history suggests otherwise. It is, in fact, increasingly difficult for standard-bearers of each party to escape party polarization even when providing competent management.
If we recall, President Barack Obama also didn’t get much of a bounce after two major events during his administration: Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the Osama bin Laden raid in 2011. And this was despite the bipartisan praise heaped on Obama for his management of those two situations.
Another criticism focuses on the external/internal dynamic of the pandemic. The rally around the flag effect, notably, is usually associated with wartime and foreign policy crises. So what if the U.S. public is seeing the coronavirus from a domestic policy lens rather than as an international threat? This could explain why Trump hasn’t received an approval spike as domestic crises are often accompanied with smaller bumps.
Yet even if it’s true that the “wartime president” crisis angle that Trump has articulated hasn’t caught on, what would explain the surges in approval for European leaders? Is there any reason the populations of Germany, Austria, Denmark, France, and Italy, for example, would respond to the crisis as external in nature while the US public reacts to the situation as a domestic political problem? This is unlikely.
A more plausible explanation is that the crisis is being perceived as a major threat to the U.S. but that Trump’s approval ceiling, all-time high U.S. party polarization, and perceptions of his response have all simultaneously dampened any potential gains that he could have accrued.
You can read the original article that sparked this discussion at the Washington Post .