Yet another poll is throwing cold water on Donald Trump’s plan to boost his own political standing by attacking governors over their handling of the coronavirus crisis. There are a lot of polls doing this. So many polls. Now, according to the new Washington Post/University of Maryland poll, 54% of Americans say Trump’s handling of coronavirus was not good or poor, while 72% say their own governors have done a good or excellent job.
Trump continues to be out of step with most Americans. He’s pushing for businesses to reopen very soon, but just 31% of people said they expected coronavirus to be controlled enough to make gatherings of 10 or more people safe by the end of May; 65% of people said it wouldn’t be safe until the end of June or later. So no, no matter how much media attention they get, those protests of shutdowns don’t reflect majority opinion.
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These results are consistent with other recent polling. A recent Pew survey found that 65% of people said Trump was too slow to respond to the outbreak, and just 20% of people told Gallup that they’d be ready to resume normal activities immediately after the government lifted restrictions. The Post/University of Maryland poll did show a partisan divide, with 48% of Republicans and Republican leaners saying they expected it to be safe to gather in groups by the end of May. Still, 51% of Republicans said it would take until the end of June or later—not exactly the message from Trump.
Rising numbers of Americans know people who have had the virus—it’s now 26%, up from 11% in mid- to late March—while 14% of people now know someone who’s been hospitalized because of it, and 9% know someone who has died.
The economic impact of the pandemic is not being evenly distributed, the poll finds. Specifically, just 23% of white people reported being concerned about affording food and other basic goods—and while normally you wouldn’t apply the modifier “just” to nearly one in four people having that worry, it’s applicable here because 39% of Black people and 48% of Latino people said the same.