PHILADELPHIA _ With President Donald Trump prioritizing a rapid economic rebound as the key to the country's revival and his own political fate, the fraught debate over when to loosen coronavirus restrictions is taking on increasingly partisan hues, including in Pennsylvania.
Strong majorities of voters still think it's more important to prioritize health and safety over reopening the economy. But recent polling suggests that views of the coronavirus response, after largely avoiding the country's usual polarization, are drifting toward familiar divides. Multiple surveys this week showed a growing share of Republicans who say it's time to put the economy first, a theme the president has hammered. And as he prepares to visit the Lehigh Valley Thursday, Trump has criticized "blue state" governors and singled out Pennsylvania for moving too slowly.
"I talked to one Democratic governor recently who said he felt like a switch was flipped the moment the president started talking about 'liberate,' " said former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, referring to Trump tweets supporting protesters who have criticized restrictions in several states. "It suddenly became political in a way it hadn't been before and it really wrecked an opportunity to have a nonpartisan understanding."
Trump's drive to jump-start the economy _ while most states fall short of even the loose guidelines his administration has outlined for reopening and testing capacity lags what experts says is needed _ represents a perilous bet. Lives and livelihoods are at stake as the country reels from more than 80,000 coronavirus deaths and the worst unemployment figures since the Great Depression.
But he has laid bare that he sees an economic revival as his path to reelection, and top priority. While the strong economy he touted is gone, Trump argues he's the one person who can bring it back _ and he's pushing governors to go along with his vision.
"We will defeat this horrible enemy, we will revive our economy, and we will transition into greatness," Trump said Monday. "That's a phrase you're going to hear a lot because that's what's going to happen."
That came hours after he tweeted that "the great people of Pennsylvania want their freedom now" and accused Democrats of "moving slowly, all over the USA, for political purposes."
Trump and fellow Republicans, however, are arguing against the weight of public opinion and the warnings of the administration's own medical experts, including Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease doctor. Fauci said Tuesday that reopening the economy too quickly could lead to avoidable "suffering and death," and an even longer economic setback if restrictions have to be slapped back into place.
Trump's critics see a president whose crisis leadership has been steered by political motivations, adding another measure of partisan tension to the already difficult questions of when to loosen restrictions.
"Anybody with as much leadership capacity as, you know, a Little League coach knows that you've got to pull people together to do something hard and motivate and inspire them that way, and I think the best governors have done that in addition to trying to do the policy things," Buttigieg said in an interview. But Trump, he said, "is somebody who seems to think that it's all about him, who's more preoccupied with how he feels he's getting treated than whether we're all going to live or die, and is concerned to the point of obsession with his own politics."
The absence of a detailed, coherent federal response has left governors to make the hard decisions about balancing economic damage and public health, even as the administration has delayed detailed guidance for reopenings drafted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"If they succeed (Trump) can say how good he was and how smart he was and how perfect his performance was," said Max Skidmore, a University of Missouri-Kansas City political science professor and author of the book "Presidents, Pandemics and Politics." "And if they fail, of course it's their fault, they should have been better."
Polls consistently show that voters trust their governors far more than they do the president _ underscoring that, despite his command of the national stage, Trump is a weakened messenger on this issue. Only 36% of adults trust the president as a source of coronavirus information, according to a CNN poll released Tuesday.
Meanwhile, some 72% of Pennsylvanians approve of Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf's handling of the coronavirus, and 77% approve of New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy's work on the issue, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.
Other governors in both parties rated even higher. Trump's approval on the pandemic stood at 43%.
The governors with the lowest approval ratings were those who resisted calls for lockdowns and reopened the quickest.
"Citizens in an emergency want to feel the sort of comfort of a leader taking responsibility and being accountable for it, and I think that the president has been a textbook case in how not to lead in a crisis," said J.J. Abbott, a former senior adviser to Wolf.
Even if Pennsylvanians don't agree with all of Wolf's specific actions, they do support "a more thoughtful and methodical approach" to reopening the economy, Abbott said.
Indeed, 74% of Americans said the country should keep trying to slow the virus, according to the Post survey, even if it means keeping businesses closed. The Pew Research Center found similar results: 68% of Americans said they are more concerned about lifting coronavirus-related restrictions too quickly than too slowly.
Those findings include large numbers of Republicans who support the restrictions, and much less polarization than on most hot-button issues. But that may be shifting.
The Pew poll also found a small dip in the share of Republicans who were more worried about opening too fast and an increase in those worried about going too slowly. In the Post survey, 92% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favored closures, but that number was just 49% for Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
A Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday saw an even more dramatic disparity. While 60% of voters still said the government should prioritize health concerns over the economy, the share of Republicans who feel that way fell from 65% to 43%.
Trump, politically damaged by his initial handling of the pandemic, is counting on voters ultimately placing more weight on an economic rebound. His son-in-law and top White House adviser, Jared Kushner, told Time magazine Tuesday the election will come down to whom voters trust to rebuild the economy.
"The president's going to be judged more by how we come out of this coronavirus pandemic rather than how we got into it," said Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster who has advised candidates in Pennsylvania.
Asked about the criticism Trump faces over early missteps, Newhouse said, "voters are more concerned about what's in front of them rather than what's behind them."
Some of the growing split can also be tied to geographic differences in the virus' spread, which in many ways overlaps existing political divides.
Rural areas, which tend to vote Republican, have generally seen less severe outbreaks. That includes Central, Northeastern and Southwestern Pennsylvania, according to researchers at the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania.
Cities, which tend to vote Democratic, have been hardest hit, including Philadelphia and its immediate suburbs. African Americans and Latinos have also been disproportionately stricken.
In Pennsylvania, Republicans in the state Legislature and county offices are stoking public fury at Wolf, urging him to loosen the restrictions and threatening open defiance of state rules as the state's caseload steadily declines.
State Rep. Mike Jones, R-York, told a gathering of more than 150 people this month that Wolf was "on the ropes" and it's "time to knock him out."
U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said to be considering a run for governor, has been less confrontational, but has argued that the worst has passed in Pennsylvania and it's time to get back to work.
"It's now clear that there is little or no risk that we're going to overwhelm the capacity of our hospitals," Toomey said at an online roundtable he organized. "Having said that, the shutdown has imposed a massive cost. This is a health care cost, it's ... economic costs, it's social costs."
More than 3,900 Pennsylvanians have died from the virus, but the rate of new confirmed cases has slowed. And with a quarter of the state's workforce filing for unemployment, Republicans say it's time to move forward.
Protesters are planning to follow Trump's visit with another Harrisburg rally Friday.
The debate isn't entirely partisan. Some Republican governors have moved cautiously on reopening, and some Democrats, including Wolf, are taking steps to ease restrictions.
And county officials in Democratic-led Delaware and Bucks counties have pressed Wolf to allow them to take more steps to restart their economies. Wolf acknowledged the "heavy" economic toll, but said that without containing the virus and making people feel safe to go out, economies will still struggle.
"In the end the ultimate goal is to defeat the virus," he said Monday. "If we don't do that, nothing else we do matters."
