Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for the New York Times and opponent of President Trump, imagined an easy path to re-election for Trump in 2020 assuming the economy remains strong and Democrats become entangled in identity politics.
In an op-ed for the Times published Thursday, Stephens, who in 2015 wrongly predicted Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election, fantasized about how his own paper would analyze another Trump victory against a hypothetical Democratic ticket of Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
“With neither a recession nor a major war to run against, Democrats sought instead to cast the election in starkly moral terms,” wrote Stephens. “Yet by Election Day, the charge that Mr. Trump is morally or intellectually unfit for office had been made so often that it had lost most of its former edge among swing voters.”
Democrats are currently struggling over how best to fight Trump, and whether their best strategy is to focus on his personal shortcomings or on attempts to appeal to white working class voters with economic issues.
Trump, however, remains enormously popular with Republican voters and his national approval numbers have remained low but relatively unchanged from the election.
In his piece, Stephens imagined an unnamed “moderate former Democratic lawmaker” lamenting after the 2020 election, “What do Democrats stand for? Lawlessness or liberality? Policy-making or virtue signaling? Gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms or good jobs and higher wages?”
