A Left Evaluation of President Trump's Chances In 2020

For John, BLUF:  If he can avoid war and recession, President Trump stands a good chance in 2020.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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What Are the Chances of Trump Being Reëlected?

From The New Yorker, by Mr John Cassidy, 19 June 2019.

Here is the lede plus three:

On Tuesday night, in Orlando, Donald Trump formally launched his 2020 reëlection effort with another big rally.  After what happened in 2016, it behooves political analysts and commentators to approach the upcoming campaign with caution.  So, I will put it no more strongly than this:  with sixteen and a half months to go, the President and his campaign staff have reasons to be concerned.

The good news for Trump is that he retains a solid base of support, and the demographic to which he has the strongest appeal—white Americans who don’t have a college degree—still represents a very big chunk of the electorate.  Plus, the unemployment rate is just 3.5 per cent, and most Americans are optimistic about the economy.  The bad news for the Trump campaign is that other demographic groups seem to have turned even more heavily against him, and a strong economy has failed to lift his approval ratings.  Moreover, recent polls suggest that he is in trouble in a number of battleground states, including the three that were key to his victory last time:  Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

You probably don’t need reminding that, thanks to the vagaries of the American political system, Trump won with just 46.1 per cent of the national vote, and a favorability rating that was considerably lower.  On November 7, 2016, the day before the election, 37.5 per cent of American voters had a favorable opinion of him, according to the Real Clear Politics poll average, which suggests that either the polls were wrong or large numbers of people voted for him despite not particularly liking him.  After his victory, his favorability rating rose to the low forties during the transition, where it has largely stayed.  The latest R.C.P. poll average showed him with a favorability rating of 43.8 per cent, which is pretty close to his latest job-approval rating—44.3 per cent on Wednesday.  It doesn’t seem to matter what he does or says: these numbers don’t change much.

Among whites without a college degree, according to the network exit poll, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by more than two to one—sixty-six per cent to twenty-nine per cent.  This slice of the electorate represents Trump’s heartland, and according to the exit poll it accounted for about a third of all voters in 2016.  (Thirty-four per cent, to be precise.)  However, some political experts believe that estimate is too low.  In a 2017 study that drew on actual voter files, national-opinion surveys, and their own post-election polling, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira, of the Center for American Progress, and Rob Griffin, a political scientist at George Washington University, concluded that forty-five per cent of the voters in 2016 were whites without a college degree—eleven percentage points more than the figure from the exit poll.

"[T]he vagaries of the American political system…"?  This seems like an ignorant attempt to cover for Mrs Clinton not knowing the rules of the game.  They are pretty straight forward—win 270 or more Electoral College votes.  Everything else is rubbish.  Whimpering is unseemly.

If you are a Democrat you are desperate to see the wind blowing your way.  However, your fellow Democrats have so poisoned the environment that polling is no longer reliable.  And identity politics ends up pitting one group against another.  I think President Trump stands a good chance in 2020.

At a personal level, I detest the term "white".  In a day and age where every snow flake is triggered by the wrong noun or pronoun, I would like some accommodation.  Please say Caucasian.

Regards  —  Cliff