Five questions about how coronavirus will affect the 2020 election

3. How is Trump going to frame the lockdowns?

In some ways this is the most important question of all because it will also affect how Biden ends up campaigning. One disadvantage Trump would seem to face in a health vs. wealth election is that the GOP skews older. The most reliable Republican voters are far more likely than the average American to be at risk for the coronavirus. Public polling suggests that they are broadly in favor of lockdowns and happy to abide by them. The question is whether they and the rest of the American people will feel the same way months from now, in the middle of an economic depression? Voters are not rational. It is entirely possible that the same people who now say they support various state-imposed social distancing measures will be insisting months from now that the lockdowns were folly from which Emperor Donald I would have delivered them had it not been for the perfidy of liberals and the deep state. Will Trump position himself as the heroic savior of the nation who carried us through the plague, or will he insist that only the advice of public health officials prevented him liberating the nation back in March? I think he will try to suggest that both things are true simultaneously and that many voters will accept it.