Why public approval of Trump's coronavirus response may not save him in November

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/07/politics/2020-election-trump-approval-covid-pandemic/index.html

As America faces a potentially unprecedented domestic death toll, the political situation facing Trump may echo those confronting other presidents during wartime. In classic research on the Korean and Vietnam wars, several political scientists found that public support for those wars, and the presidents pursuing them, declined as casualties increased. In the 2009 book "Paying the Human Costs of War," Feaver and two colleagues qualified that research to argue that in fact, the public is much more tolerant of casualties when it believes that launching the war was the right decision and that the US is headed toward success, than if it concludes the war effort is doomed to fail.

That means the casualty level alone typically doesn't decide a president's fate in war-time, Feaver maintains. Instead, presidents face not only a "prospective" judgment about whether they will win the war but a "retrospective" verdict on whether launching the war was the right choice at all. The equivalent in November, he says, might be a division between a "prospective" judgment that the nation is heading out of the coronavirus ordeal and a "retrospective" judgment that Trump compounded the problem by initially reacting too slowly and downplaying the problem.