THREAD: In forecasting Trump's fate, one needs to be careful as there is a fair amount of uncertainty as to what the trajectory of the pandemic will look like by November. Overly precise predictions of COVID numbers in X country/state by Y date have generally not fared well. https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1284109211190931456

What we can say for sure is that the US has *already been hit really hard*. And even if the numbers are improving by the fall—which, to be clear, may take some luck—we'd probably be looking at spring before there's a robust economic recovery and things feel 85% "normal" again.

But there probably is a narrow window where by Nov., there have been ~2 months of real improvement. Would that be enough to reelect Trump? I don't know. I tend to think the public would still give him bad marks for COVID, and keep in mind he was behind before any of this started.

Still, I can imagine that—with a low bar for success and people fatigued by months of lockdowns—he'd have a more tenable position with competing claims ("worst is behind us" vs. "still really bad") that got treated by voters/media a fairly standard-fare partisan argument.

And Trump has an advantage in a standard-fare partisan election because of the Electoral College.