Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
The impact of the virus will be felt mostly acutely and immediately in coastal cities Trump has already lost. It appears the impact most likely to harm him politically will be from the stock market continuing to tank and economic activity grinding to a halt. The Rust Belt and flyoverland states where Trump collects the greatest number of Electoral College wins will feel the pain later than the coasts, one would presume. (Investors everywhere will feel it at roughly the same time, but I don't think Trump's supporters are heavily in the market.) The question is how much later does Trumpworld feel the economic pain than than the Blue States on the coasts? I doubt it's beyond the first week of November... but perhaps it could be?
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A month ago it was Wuhan that was feeling the pain; by last week the streets of Venice and Rome were empty. If a lot of people get sick in coastal cities, a lot of people are going to get sick in the heartland, and it's not going to take very long. As always, I am impressed by your Marxist conviction that politics follows so directly from economics, but this is a case where I think you're missing something. I'm not sure whether the epidemic is going to cause people to rally to authoritarianism or turn them off Trump's particular combination of braggadocio and incompetence, but I think the political impact will be sui generis and not simply a function of pocketbook issues. Though I do think we're going to get a recession out of this, but I wouldn't assume that people will react the way they ordinarily do in a recession.
eta:
One of the problems in the US has been the testing for Covid-19. We haven't been testing many people, in part because we didn't have the capability, and it's a reasonable guess that there are more cases that haven't been found yet because the symptoms are much like flu symptoms and the CDC's protocol about who gets the test (plausibly necessary to keep everyone from asking for tests and overwhelming the function) meant that until quite recently you could have the symptoms but wouldn't get tested unless you had, e.g., traveled to China. In the last day, Pence and the White House (who are now preventing scientists at the CDC from talking to anyone) have stopped reporting the number of tests being done. The White House seems to view this all from a partisan lens, or at least they have found that a useful way to deflect criticism, but I don't think it's going to play well with voters once more people start dying.
