US divided year out from election
Democrats still searching for their message to take on Trump
In less than a year voters will decide whether to grant US President Donald Trump a second term in office, an election that will be a referendum on Trump’s vision for America’s culture and role in the world.
Much is unknown about how the United States and its politics will look on election day November 4, 2020.
Who will Trump’s opponent be? How will Democrats resolve the ideological, generational and demographic questions roiling their primary? Will a strong economy shore up Trump’s support or will recession warning signs turn into a reality? Will Trump face voters as just the third American President to have been impeached by the House of Representatives?
This much seems certain: The nation will plunge into the election as deeply divided as it has been politically in more than half a century, when cities were in flames with protests over war and civil rights.
“It seems like Republicans and Democrats are intractable,” said Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and chairman of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation. “They are both adhering to their own versions of reality, whether they’re based in truth or not.”
The political divisions today reflect societal and economic schisms between more rural, largely white communities where the economy depends on industries being depleted by outsourcing and automation, and more urban, racially diverse areas dominated by a service economy and where technology booms are increasing wealth.
Many of those divisions existed before Trump, but his presidency has exacerbated them. Trump has panned his political opponents as “human scum”, while Democrats view his vision for America’s future as anathema to the nation’s founding values.
Indeed, no president in the history of public opinion polling has faced such deep and consistent partisan polarisation.
Polling conducted by Gallup shows that an average of 86 per cent
of Republicans have approved of Trump over the course of his time in office, and no less than 79 per cent have approved in any individual poll. That’s compared with just 7 per cent of Democrats who have approved on average, including no more than 12 per cent in any individual poll.
To win, Trump’s campaign needs to recreate the enthusiasm among his core supporters, a task that isn’t always easy for an incumbent burdened with a four-year record in office. But Trump is already leaning hard into the strict immigration policies that enlivened his supporters in 2016, while trying to convince more sceptical Republicans that Democrats are moving so far left as to be outside of the mainstream.
Trump’s case for re-election may hinge on the state of the economy, which continues to grow. The unemployment rate is also near a fivedecade low of 3.6 per cent.
“At the end of the day, people care about their pocket books and how they’re doing and I think he can clearly point to life being better off,” said Jason Chaffetz, a former Republican congressman from Utah. But he added, “Any precipitous drop would hurt the president.”
The Democratic Party is struggling to figure out its own message to voters beyond contempt for Trump, the one sure thing that unites Democratic voters.
With three months until primaryseason voting begins, the top tier of candidates reflects the party’s uncertainty over its own identity.
Former Vice-President Joe Biden promotes his decades of experience and running as an unabashed moderate willing to work across the political aisle. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are pushing for sweeping liberal change.
With all three of those candidates in their 70s, Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is running a surprisingly successful campaign on a call for generational change.
The biggest known unknown for both parties may be how the ongoing impeachment proceedings will be viewed by Americans one year from now. But like the broader contours of American politics, the impeachment proceedings are so far breaking along partisan lines.
Updegrove, the presidential historian, said the question a year from now will be whether that matters.
“If not, what will matter to the American people as a whole?” he asked. “Is there anything?”
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