Four reasons Trump could win in 2020
Since I loathe Donald Trump with the ferocity of a thousand suns – and regard the prospect of a second Trump term as just shy of apocalyptic – it pains me to admit, just under a year away from the 2020 US presidential election, that he is probably slightly better than even money to win again. At the risk of this turning into a listicle, I have four reasons.
First things first: absent a recession, incumbents in US presidential politics just don’t tend to lose, and few experts see an economic downturn coming in time to disrupt Trump’s reelection plans.
Happily for Republicans, they continue to ride the Obama-led expansion, even if growth has slowed to a modest 2 per cent after the one-off sugar high of their reckless, deficit-funded, tax cuts for the rich. A stable economy combined with the benefits of incumbency makes it near impossible to topple any sitting president, even one as corrupt, boorish and incompetent as this one.
Secondly, the Electoral College – that idiosyncratically American way of determining presidential elections. In 2016, Hillary Clinton famously won three million more votes than Trump nationally by running up big, pointless margins where they didn’t count.
Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, picked up just the right number of Electoral College votes by eking out victories in key states in the Upper Midwest.
An identical path lies wide open for Trump this time because, while he is deeply, historically unpopular in most of the country, he remains competitive in Wisconsin, Michigan and, to a lesser extent, Pennsylvania.
To offset this advantage, Democrats need to find new states to flip from Trump – Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas are most often mentioned – and, while each of those is trending more and more Democratic over time, none looks likely to go as quickly as next year. Given his durable strength in other swing states like Ohio and Florida, Trump could again lose the popular vote – this time by five million, say, or even more – and still hang on to power via the Rust Belt.
The third reason Trump is stronger than his abysmal poll numbers suggest? His rival Democrats appear determined to give him a leg up by proposing a $50-plus trillion-with-a-T healthcare plan that seems tailor-made for a Trumpist campaign of fear and smear.
Don’t get me wrong: I would vote in a heart-beat for Elizabeth Warren’s plan to fundamentally restructure the US economy by creating nationalised healthcare and abolishing private insurers, paid for by radically more progressive taxation.
In fact, I haven’t seen a better strategy for addressing both health and wealth inequality in many election cycles. Warren, and Bernie Sanders, to be fair, deserve credit for their policy boldness with Medicare for All.
All that said, it spells electoral death. Democrats can mitigate this, of course, by nominating a more moderate standard-bearer like Joe Biden, smalltown mayor Pete Buttigieg or Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar – but that won’t stop Republicans from gleefully sliming whoever it is as a tax-andspend socialist, and Democrats as, now and forever, the party of Medicare for All.
Fourth and finally, it comes down to money – and the Trump re-election effort is awash in it. His campaign and related entities have raised $300 million this year, and have more than half of that available as cash on hand. That’s twice what Obama had raised at the equivalent time in his presidency – and Obama was considered an unrivalled money-making machine for Democrats at the time.
The Republicans are spending upwards of $1m every week on web and Facebook ads, a channel at which they have proven to be devastatingly effective; meanwhile, 14 Democrats vying for the nomination are scrapping over sparse funds to deploy against each other.
The resilience of the president’s vaunted ‘‘base’’ is well known. In his own words, he could shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue without losing a single vote from the MAGA crowd. It’s true. For roughly 35 per cent of Americans, Trump can do no wrong; for evangelicals, he is heaven-sent. Adulation warps their observational powers to such a degree that a stadium full of boos, as Trump encountered twice in the past week, actually sound like cheers.
Trump’s base alone won’t do it, but when you consider 45 per cent, or less, is enough to win as long as he wins in the right places, and that the Republicans are fearsomely well prepared to bombard voters in exactly those places, he is far better positioned for re-election than he has any right to be.
His campaign and related entities have raised $300 million this year.