Out of control Covid casts pall over Trump campaign
Welcome to today’s US election briefing for Australia.
Americans learned they had set a grim new milestone in coronavirus infections over the weekend, with more than 80,000 new cases recorded across the country in a single day on Friday. The pandemic is not going away, or rounding a corner, as Donald Trump continues to suggest, in fact it is getting worse.
It’s a tragedy for the thousands of Americans who will die in the coming months, become sick or continue to suffer severe economic hardship. It is also reality casting a long shadow over the president’s reelection hopes.
“Turn on the television: Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,” Trump complained to supporters at a rally on Saturday, before suggesting the worsening pandemic was essentially a media scare campaign. “By the way, on 4 November you won’t hear about it anymore.”
Democrats have long accused Trump of ineptitude, bordering on total surrender, to the virus. Two other developments over the weekend bolstered that argument.
Watch: Could a second wave of coronavirus delay the 2020 election?
The first was news that four members of vice president Mike Pence’s inner circle had tested positive, raising new questions about safety procedures at the highest levels of government. Despite being a close contact of positive cases, Pence is continuing to fly across the country to campaign at rallies, a breach of the US public health agency’s own guidelines (the White House says Pence is an “essential worker”)
The second development was the very stark admission by Trump’s White House chief of staff that they had essentially given up on trying to control the virus’ spread. A day before Victoria announced it was opening up, having smashed its curve, Mark Meadows told a Sunday morning news program: “We’re not going to control the pandemic.” Instead, he said, they were focused on vaccines and treatments. You can read the full story on his comments here.
Trump’s reelection hopes now hinge on enough Americans either believing the pandemic is not as bad as it seems, or that it’s beyond his administration’s powers to control it, and that a solution is just beyond the horizon. Given the distrust in institutions and personal faith so many Americans have in Trump, neither of those possibilities should be wholly discounted.
But the reality of the pandemic is becoming harder to ignore. Expect news coverage to be Covid, Covid, Covid in the final nine days.
The big stories
Amy Coney Barrett is expected to be confirmed to the supreme court on Monday, US time. You can read more about the last minute efforts to secure her position, despite the Covid outbreak among the VP’s staff, here.
More than 50 million Americans have cast ballots in the election with 11 days to go in the campaign, a pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout in over a century.
Biden’s hopes of reaching the White House could rest on two crucial demographic groups that appear to be deserting Trump: elderly people and suburban women. Here’s the latest on demographic trends in the polls.
Biden’s promise to “transition” away from the oil industry during last week’s presidential debate has caused uproar among conservatives while being praised by environmentalists as being a candid acknowledgment of the scale of the climate crisis.
‘I’m more enthusiastic now than in 2016.’ Guardian US reporter Chris McGreal spent a month travelling across the country speaking to Trump supporters who are fired up about his potential reelection – here’s why they’re backing him again.
In 2016, turnout fell in Cleveland, Ohio, an overwhelmingly Democratic city where nearly half the population is black, as it did in others across the midwest, helping to usher Trump to victory. So will things be any different this year?
Donald Trump Jr has teased at a presidential tilt in 2024. The unlikely political heir apparent to his father posed in front of a “Don Jr 2024” sign in Nevada on Saturday, posted the picture online and said he was waiting for “the lib heads to explode”.
Quote of the day
These billboards are not causing [their] standing with the public to plummet. Their incompetence is.”
A lawyer for the Republican anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, which has erected a billboard in Times Square attacking Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, responds to a legal threat from the couple.
Election view
A “shrinking and increasingly conservative, rural and white segment of the US population has been imposing its will on the rest of America,” writes Robert Reich, but Biden can reverse that course if he acts quickly with reforming the supreme court and senate.
Video of the day
Here’s a brief moment of exuberance in the very long lines Americans are experiencing during early voting.
Around the web
This is a fascinating piece in the NYT about the White House’s last-ditch effort to change the narrative, and the election, by pushing a Hunter Biden story on the Wall Street Journal. The paper ended up running a very different piece.
Some of the same people who pushed a false conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton in 2016 are now targeting Hunter Biden with similar falsehoods, reports NBC, garnering astronomical numbers of shares on social media. The falsehoods “echo specific plot points central to ‘pizzagate’, a viral disinformation campaign that predates QAnon but also falsely alleges a vast conspiracy of child abuse”.
The WSJ reports that the Trump administration tried to draft Santa Claus performers to promote a Covid-19 vaccine, in exchange for early access to it. The $250m deal fell through.
What the numbers say: 57
The percentage of Americans who view Joe Biden favourably, according to a recent Fox News poll, with 41% viewing him unfavourably. In November 2016, Hillary Clinton was viewed unfavourably by 52% of Americans.
Watch: What are ballot drop boxes? Yahoo News Explains
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