"The forces he is up against are much bigger than President Trump and are tectonic in nature. There are a set of forces that push us apart rather than bring us together," says Grant Reeher, professor of political science. But, he adds, "I do think having a period of time for the country to experience the absence of the daily melodrama of the Trump presidency will help."

"I thought at some point, reality would come back in for people and they would have a hard time balancing their motivations to stay consistent with their partisanship with what's going on on the ground," says Shana Gadarian, associate professor of political science.  "That was wholly optimistic on my part."

"White women have to disabuse themselves en masse of the notion that they are inherently good. They have to put themselves in harm’s way, disrupt the status quo of their own complicity in white supremacy and defer to those who are more vulnerable than themselves," writes Jenn Jackson, assistant professor of political science.

"If you are someone who already trusts the president and you trust him to handle the crisis, then you are both not as concerned as Democrats are and you're more willing to trust that he is the person who can keep you safe and keep the country safe from COVID," says Shana Gadarian, associate professor of political science.

"If we want people to feel comfortable enough to go back out to bars and restaurants, to travel, and to send their kids to school, we need to see a decline in cases, and people need to feel confident that their peers will behave responsibly for the greater good," says Shannon Monnat, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion.

Polarization will also likely exist long after President Donald Trump has left the stage, says Jeffrey Stonecash, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science. "A fundamental argument coming out of the Democratic Party is that things are not fair. You have a Republican Party making a moral argument that’s fundamentally different...that it’s not about ‘fairness,’ it’s about who’s more deserving," he writes.

Grant Reeher, professor of political science, says that Trump could be looking to recover after being largely criticized for his performance in the first presidential debate last month, where the candidates traded insults and crosstalk clogged much of the conversation. "I think there's more pressure on (Trump) to remedy that in terms of the way he comes across in this event," he says.