As major U.S. cities are engulfed in flames amid mass rioting and looting, there has been a default argument people have been making that this will play right into President Trump’s hands and give a boost to his reelection prospects. But I’m not so sure.
The argument that it helps him is that the urban unrest we’re seeing, and the fact that Democrats have been reluctant to condemn it, will energize the sort of swing state white voters that Trump requires for his reelection. The riots of 1968, for example, helped rescue Richard Nixon from political oblivion and vault him to the White House.
While such an outcome is of course possible, it isn’t quite such a slam dunk.
There’s an important distinction, which is that in 1968, Nixon was running as a challenger and promising to restore law and order. Trump, in contrast, is already president. And as the incumbent, it’s much harder to run on a message to restore law and order when major American cities descended into chaos under your watch.
When I noted this on Twitter, the defense of Trump was that the violence is happening in cities run by Democrats. But that doesn’t really change anything. Reelecting Trump won’t change Democratic control of the cities. So if Trump was unable to overcome Democratic mismanagement of urban centers and restore order in his first term, why would he be able to do so in a second term?
One could also imagine Joe Biden arguing to white suburbanites that the way to restore order is to address the root causes of the violence and to have a president who doesn’t say incendiary things during an already volatile situation.
The Washington Examiner has editorialized that the coronavirus pandemic, and the wide range of outcomes for public health and the economy come fall, has created even more reason to be skeptical of horse race polling this far out from the election. And that was before the riots.
So, sure, the violence could end up playing into Trump’s reelection. But it’s not at all obvious that it will.
