What do white suburbanites fear more: Living among people of color – or dying from COVID-19?
Joe Biden is rightly betting that it’s the latter. On social media yesterday, he framed the top issue of 2020: “President Obama and I left a playbook for President Trump on how to fight pandemics. He flat-out ignored it. And we’re all paying the price every day.”
But Trump, who’s tanking in suburbia thanks to his cataclysmic mishandling of the pandemic, has apparently decided that his only remaining play is to stoke fears of black and brown folks – no surprise, because there’s nothing else in his toolbox – and to do so with all his trademark subtlety.
Three times this week, he highlighted Biden’s support for a federal fair housing rule – created in 1968 and barely enforced since – that’s designed to nudge the suburbs toward making it a little easier for minorities to live there. You could smell the stench of Trump’s desperation.
He declared (lied) that Biden and the Democrats want to “abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs…Suburbia will be no longer as we know it….People who have worked all their lives to get into a community and now they’re going to watch it go to hell.” Trump vows to “protect the suburbs from being obliterated” by Biden. He says Biden is determined to destroy “the American way of life.”
He’s not even bothering to blow the dog whistle anymore. This is vintage George Wallace, circa 1968, bellowing that if Black people come to suburbia, the idyllic life will end and property values will plummet. And, frankly, it’s the same Trump who was rebuked by the Justice Department during the 1970s for refusing to rent to Blacks; the same Trump who, according to niece Mary, has always been “virulently racist.”
Trump’s newly recycled racist message (Biden will abolish white suburbia!) is archaic anyway – according to the Pew Research Center, suburbia is increasingly integrated; in 2018, the white share of the population was down to 68 percent – and even though it probably still clicks with his cultists, it’s woefully out of touch with the current national mood.
Here’s the gist: Suburbanites comprise roughly 49 percent of the electorate (according to the exit polls in 2016). In that tight race, Trump won suburbanites by four percentage points, a pivotal metric. But he has been losing ground with those voters ever since – Republican pollster Whit Ayres sees “continuing weakness of the Republican brand in suburban areas that had traditionally voted Republican” – and now he’s hemorrhaging support, as best evidenced by this stat in the latest national Quinnipiac poll:
By a landslide margin of 62 to 33 percent, suburban voters said that Biden would do a better job combating the pandemic.
As longtime Republican strategist Stuart Stevens told NBC News this week, “The suburbs are a lot more worried that Trump will kill them…than Biden will kill them opposing racism.”
This explains why Biden is strongly competitive in red states like Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and even Texas and Georgia. Fear of the coronavirus – and the ever-growing realization that Trump is MIA on the most dire domestic health threat since 1918 – pervades suburbia (and everywhere else, of course), and easily trumps the failed president’s cartoon warning that if Biden wins, “the American dream would be quickly snuffed out and replaced by a socialist nightmare.”
Well, guess what: the American dream has already been snuffed out for 140,000 Americans. And 72,000 new cases were reported yesterday, a new one-day record. Trump’s racism may have worked in 2016, but now he’s stuck with a body count that will only continue to mount. A national poll released today says that only 38 percent of all Americans like the way he’s handling the pandemic (a new low) – an erosion fueled by losses even within his fan base. Since May, he has dropped 16 points among white evangelical Protestants, and 15 points among white guys without college degrees.
And in suburbia, the big fear right now is not about minorities benefiting some future day from a fair housing regulation; it’s about putting innocent schoolchildren – and their teachers, and the staffers – in harm’s way. White House propaganda minister Kayleigh McEnany made it crystal clear yesterday that Trump is coming for their kids:
“The president has said unmistakably that he wants schools to open. And when he says open, he means open in full, kids been able to attend each and every day at their school. The science should not stand in the way of this.”
And Trump thinks he can persuade suburbanites that Joe Biden is a threat to their quality of life? Only a guy who somehow went bankrupt running casinos could possibly believe that’s a good bet.