America's Chances in 2020

Okay, so. Seriously.

What ARE trump's chances at winning a second term?

(waits for 65 million Hillary voters and 98 percent of the global population to calm down)

Well, okay, settle down, let's go over what 538 Nate Silver's got on his plate:

In a predictive sense, what it means is less clear. Sometimes — as was the case in 2006, 1974 and 1930 — midterm waves are followed by turnover in the presidency two years later. But most presidents win re-election, including those who endured rough midterms (such as Obama in 2010, Bill Clinton in 1994 and Ronald Reagan in 1982). Nor is there any obvious relationship between how high turnout was at the midterm and how the incumbent president performed two years later. Democrats’ high turnout in 1970 presaged a landslide loss in 1972, when they nominated George McGovern.

(waits for a fresh bout of panic to calm down) Okay, back to Silver:

This year’s results do serve as a warning to Trump in one important sense, however: His base alone will not be enough to win a second term. Throughout the stretch run of the 2018 midterm campaign, Trump and Republicans highlighted highly charged partisan issues, from the Central American migrant caravan to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. And Republican voters did indeed turn out in very high numbers: GOP candidates for the House received more than 50 million votes, more than the roughly 45 million they got in 2010.

But it wasn’t enough, or even close to enough. Problem No. 1 is that Republicans lost among swing voters: Independent voters went for Democrats by a 12-point margin, and voters who voted for a third-party candidate in 2016 went to Democrats by 13 points.

This is a key thing I am pinning a lot of hope on. In 2016, trump eked out non-Party voters 46-42 over Hillary. The way trump has been performing - alienating vast swaths of non-MAGA people on his suicidal course of high tariffs, wall-building, and diminishing tax refunds for Middle America - should guarantee trump and the Republicans have lost enough Indy voters to outperform Democrats in 2020. There looks to be a 12-point shift right now in Indy voters from 46-42 to what should be 40-48 favoring Democrats, which should add onto what Silver offers as second point:

Trump and Republicans also have Problem No. 2, however: Their base is smaller than the Democratic one. This isn’t quite as much of a disadvantage as it might seem; the Democratic base is less cohesive and therefore harder to govern. Democratic voters are sometimes less likely to turn out, although that wasn’t a problem this year...

I don’t want to go too far out on a limb in terms of any sort of prediction for 2020. In fact, lest you think that the midterms were the first step toward an inevitable one-term Trump presidency, several facts bear repeating: Most incumbent presidents win re-election...

(waits for third round of massive panic to subside) Sigh:

...and although Democrats had a strong midterm this year, midterm election results aren’t strongly correlated with what happens in the presidential election two years later. Moreover, presidential approval numbers can shift significantly over two years, so while Trump would probably lose an election today on the basis of his approval ratings, his ratings today aren’t strongly predictive of what they’ll be in November 2020.

But presidents such as Reagan, Clinton and Obama, who recovered to win re-election after difficult midterms, didn’t do it without making some adjustments. Both Reagan and Clinton took a more explicitly bipartisan approach after their midterm losses. Obama at least acknowledged the scope of his defeat, owning up to his “shellacking” after 2010, although an initially bipartisan tone in 2011 had given way to a more combative approach by 2012...

Okay, here's what I have.

As Silver points out, there's still a lot of days on the calendar for trump to shift his positions and work towards a more bipartisan agenda, which would go a long way towards mollifying Indy voters (and maybe creating rifts among Democrats that would otherwise be more united against a partisan trump).

But that will honestly be a day when pigs fly. trump can no more change his nature - insulting, divisive, greedy, destructive - than a tiger can change his stripes. There is NOTHING trump can do right now to change his approval ratings: People who love him will keep his polling numbers from sinking below 32 percent, but the People who HATE him will keep his polling numbers from rising above 42 percent...

One thing I noted in 2012 - discussing Obama's chances at re-election - is that incumbents tend to win as long as they are popular. I said this:

when you look back on the history of one-term Presidents, the consistent pattern between most of them is that they were unpopular, at least unpopular enough within their own party to be snubbed by the power-brokers in the backrooms when the next election rolled around...

Part of this doesn't directly apply to trump: the power-brokers in the backrooms arguably hate trump and the damage he's done to their internal organization, but they're unable to position a challenger due to trump's insanely high intra-party popularity with the rabid base.

So the other part is the unpopularity with the overall voting base, and the thing that makes me hopeful there is the established polling of the past two years where trump never got higher than 45 percent overall approval. trump is consistently unpopular, and has done little to counter it because he's too eager to pander to a Far Right extreme rather than to a moderate stance that could bring ambivalent voters back to his fold.

This is where it all matters who the Democratic Party finally picks to challenge in 2020. As long as the Dems select someone with better than 50 percent approval, trump is toast.

I have to admit my earlier assumptions about 2016 being wrong. Back then, I thought Hillary had a chance to win enough votes to secure a clean victory.

I knew Hillary was hated, especially by the Republican Party who hated her more than her husband. But I was caught off balance by the Beltway media's hatred of her: Their willingness to kick her and her campaign was at ten times the focus they ever gave trump, while granting THAT Shitgibbon - even at trump's worst - almost a free pass. All that bad coverage - including the last-minute bomb of "her emails" that may have scared away wavering voters - resulted in Hillary losing just enough voters in the Midwest to let trump eke out an Electoral College win. I was right that Hillary was less hated (she got 45 percent over trump's 42 percent of the popular vote), but I was wrong that Hillary would do better than that 45 percent...

The good news for Democrats is that the fresh batch of challengers - from Kamala Harris to Elizabeth Warren to Cory Booker and to even the unannounced like Bernie and Biden and Beto - all beat trump in the popularity contests. As long as the Democratic voters and agitators all agree to back the winner - as long as there are no splits among the ranks like there was between Hillary and Bernie - the Democrats can beat an unpopular incumbent with a popular winner.

I won't be at all surprised that the Republicans will try - again - to dirty up every Democratic challenger because it's basically the ONLY attack they have left. But if the next Democratic candidate is closer to Obama's style and personality and charisma, those attacks aren't going to work.

Just remember to get the damn vote out, America. Turnout beats every dirty trick the GOP has.