Having been burned the last time around, pundits may be wary of saying so, but the truth is President Trump is in serious danger of losing his reelection bid in 2020.
Of course, there’s reason to be cautious with any predictions. The election is more than a year from now, we have no idea who the Democratic nominee will be, previous incumbents have struggled with popularity in their third year only to be reelected the following fall, and Trump won in 2016 despite pooling poorly.
All of that said, there are a number of factors that should be worrisome to Trump and his Republican supporters.
To start, it’s worth remembering just how close Trump came to losing in 2016. Despite the appearance of a relatively comfortable Electoral College margin, Trump won because he edged out Hillary Clinton in three states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan) by less than a point. Effectively, 80,000 additional votes in those states would have swung the election to Clinton. The Democratic nominee does not need to do dramatically better than Clinton in order to win, but only to marginally improve over Clinton’s performance in these battlegrounds.
Both nationally and at the individual state level Trump is extremely unpopular, with just a 39% approval rating in the most recent Gallup poll.
It’s true that at the equivalent time during their presidencies, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan weren’t polling much better — at 40% and 43%, respectively. Both comfortably won reelection, Reagan doing so by a historic landslide.
Neither comparison is particularly relevant, however. Both Obama and Reagan took office with a bad economy, with unemployment initially spiking. At the equivalent point of their presidencies, unemployment was at 9% or higher. As the economic climate improved, their approval ratings picked up. (In Obama’s case, on top of the bad economy, August 2011 saw the fallout from the debt ceiling crisis.)
In contrast, Trump came into office with the economy in a recovery. For the past year and a half, unemployment has been at, or below, 4%, and currently stands at 3.7%. This has not improved assessments of his job performance.
Additionally, both Reagan and Obama had high peaks at the beginning of their presidencies: Reagan hitting 68% in the spring 1981 and Obama reaching 67%. So that showed they had a decent ceiling. Over the course of their first terms, Obama averaged 49% approval and Reagan averaged 50.3%. Those averages are higher than Trump’s peak, which was 46%. Trump, in other words, has been underwater for his entire presidency.
The state level polling isn’t any more encouraging, according to Morning Consult. In Michigan, Trump’s net approval rating has tumbled 21% since taking office. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, it’s down 19%. He’s deeply underwater in all three of these key states.
Trump and his supporters cite several reasons for his poll numbers, including the “never ending Fake News.” But even if one wants to blame the media, it isn’t as if anti-Trump bias going to suddenly go away next year. If he’s going to win, he’s going to have to overcome it as he did in 2016.
Also, some supporters content themselves by looking at the Democratic nomination fight and seeing that the nominee will either be a wobbly, elderly Joe Biden, or a candidate who has taken radical policy positions that would be easy to attack in a general election. The hope that Americans will be turned off by the radicalization of Democrats might be compelling if Trump were a candidate who could stay on message. But whatever crazy controversies next year’s election will end up being about, it will surely not be decided on the basis of blistering and cogent policy critiques from Trump.
Other Republicans may be contented by polls, such as one by NPR/Marist showing Democrats’ favorability ratings underwater. In the survey, Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren were negative 1 point, California Sen. Kamala Harris was negative 11 points, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was negative 17 points. However, it’s worth noting, again, that the Democratic nominee doesn’t necessarily need to be well liked. He or she can win by being just slightly less unpopular than Clinton was. And in the fall of 2016, Clinton was negative 15 points, so worse than everybody except for Sanders. Also, these numbers are taken in the heat of the Democratic primary. It’s possible that the Democratic nominee will be more popular once the party picks somebody and has a chance to unify the party.
Other factors that Trump benefited from in 2016, such as the element of surprise and the lack of energy among Democrats, is unlikely to be repeated in 2020, now that their voters understand the reality of a Trump presidency.
Again, none of this is to say that Trump is doomed. After all, he won in 2016 despite polling as the least popular nominee of any major party in the modern polling era. But there are many danger signs.
