What Went Down During The Vice Presidential Debate
Pence begins his pandemic answer by talking about China. Trump obviously has called COVID-19 “The China virus” which is pretty obviously racist. But blaming China for the spread of the disease has become a pretty common fall-back line for the Trump campaign. As Nate points out, pretty awkward when there’s a huge cluster of cases at the place where he works.
If the candidates are in fact going to play by the rules and not interrupt each other, they are going to have to rely a lot on facial expressions to say the things they’d like to say while their opponent is talking. So far, Harris is saying plenty with no words at all.
COVID-19 was named as the most important issue by 32 percent of respondents overall, and Biden had a commanding lead for which candidate respondents thought would be better at handling it. Of course, the majority of people who named that as their top issue are Biden supporters to begin with.
Americans think Biden is better at handling COVID-19
Share of people who named each issue as the most important one facing the U.S., and whether they think Trump or Biden would handle that issue better, according to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll
| Who’s better on the issue… | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| issue | share | TRUMP | biden | ||
| COVID-19 | 31.9% | 20.1% | 78.0% | ||
| The economy | 22.0 | 79.1 | 19.2 | ||
| Health care | 9.6 | 27.9 | 71.8 | ||
| Racial inequality | 7.4 | 6.0 | 90.9 | ||
| Climate change | 4.9 | 4.7 | 95.3 | ||
| The Supreme Court | 4.5 | 61.1 | 38.4 | ||
| Violent crime | 4.2 | 80.6 | 18.1 | ||
| Economic inequality | 2.9 | 14.3 | 85.7 | ||
| Immigration | 2.8 | 61.3 | 38.7 | ||
| Abortion | 2.8 | 93.5 | 6.5 | ||
| Other | 1.7 | 55.3 | 41.8 | ||
| Education | 1.5 | 44.7 | 44.1 | ||
| Gun policy | 1.4 | 69.6 | 30.4 | ||