It’ll Be Chaos
Expect an extremely close election in 2020
WE are heading into uncharted waters 364 days before the 2020 election. All signs indicate voter turnout levels so high and races so close we could be looking at chaos and indecision so extreme they will make the 2000 election look like a hootenanny.
In Kentucky’s election on Tuesday night, the Republican governor got 190,000 more votes than he did when he won the office in 2015 — and his Democratic rival this year got 300,000 more than his Democratic rival did the last time. All in all, half a million more votes were cast in the Bluegrass State in 2019, when a grand total of 937,000 Kentuckians went to the polls.
That’s a turnout increase of 53 percent from the most comparable election. Fifty-three. Percent. Keep that 53 number in mind. In the 2018 midterms, nationwide, 53 percent of eligible voters participated. That was the largest turnout in percentage terms since 1914. In 2014, the national turnout number was 36 percent.
Total nationwide vote in 2018: 118 million. Total in 2014: 83 million. In numerical terms, that was a 30 percent increase.
What I’m saying is Trump’s electric effect on the American political system has stimulated voters on both sides.
Remember that while Trump only nominally increased the overall Republican vote from 2012 to 2016, he scored huge increases in rural areas where there had been no GOP vote before.
This week’s massive New York Times-Siena poll of the eight battleground states that will likely decide the election suggests Trump is holding onto those voters. That is good news for him. The bad is that the overall feverish atmosphere indicates a jump in Democratic participation all over the place, as it did both in the 2018 midterms and the special elections in 2017.
And given that his 2016 victory was due in part to a depressed Democratic turnout for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic enthusiasm for voting poses a huge threat to Trump’s reelection.
On Tuesday in Mississippi, a state Trump won by 17 points, the Republican gubernatorial candidate won by fewer than six points — while the Democrat received nearly double the votes his precedessor got on the Democratic line in 2015.
Now, close only counts in horseshoes. In all but two of our 50 states, you only need to win by a single vote to get all the electoral votes, and nobody doubts Trump will win both Kentucky and Mississippi next year. Indeed, if either state were even a question mark, Trump would already be packing for his newly declared place of residence, Florida.
But as an overall indication of the mood of the national electorate, Democrats have the wind at their backs. That’s why you’ve been seeing stories about Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and his highly technocratic approach to 2020.
He has hundreds of millions of dollars to play with and playing with them is exactly what he’s doing — collecting millions of voters’ names, e-mails and cellphone numbers, keeping in touch with them daily, getting them to tell their friends and using Facebook so extravagantly that you need no longer wonder why Mark Zuckerberg won’t ban political ads on Facebook.
Parscale’s approach has antiTrumpers rattled, but he still seems to be operating in a realm in which he is mostly appealing to people who are already Trump voters. This is a conceptual problem for Trump and his campaign. He is going to need to match almost-certain Democratic vote growth next year, and there’s not much sign he’s making inroads there.
In three major suburban counties in Pennsylvania, once GOP strongholds, Democrats blew Republicans away Tuesday night — and Trump only won Pennsylvania by a mere 44,000 votes. He can’t get the same number of votes in Pennsylvania as he did last time and expect to win. He’s going to need hundreds of thousands more.
None of this is to say that the Democrats running for president should be giving Trump nightmares, given the profound individual weaknesses they all have and which he will be able to exploit ruthlessly.
That’s why I think we could be seeing breathtakingly close results in states across the country in 2020, with a series of recounts and claims of electoral suppression on both sides. In other words, we’ll go through another year of this and then Election Night will not bring relief but heightened and renewed political anxiety and partisan rage.
Enjoy!