By every discrete metric available, President Trump should win re-election. In the past 38 years, just one presidential incumbent has failed to retake the White House, and Trump may be historically unpopular, but despite the media coverage, he’s not by much.
At this stage in their presidencies, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan had approval ratings of 48, 63.8, 49.4, and 41.1 percent, respectively. Trump currently has a 42 percent approval rating, a figure that’s deviated only by a percentage point or so in the past year.
Yet doesn’t it still feel like Trump will lose? Even with one of the best job markets in a century and relative domestic stability, no other president has publicly feuded with dead war heroes and his subordinate’s spouse on Twitter before. Unlike any other administration, the chaos of the Trump era is constant.
Exactly. It’s constant. Despite left-wing reiterations that none of this is normal, increasingly it is, and the statistical models demonstrate that.
POLITICO reports that of 12 different economic models predicting the outcome of the 2020 election, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi has found that Trump wins all of them.
“If the election were held today, Trump would win according to the models and pretty handily,” said Zandi. “In three or four of them it would be pretty close. He’s got low gas prices, low unemployment and a lot of other political variables at his back. The only exception is his popularity, which matters a lot. If that falls off a cliff it would make a big difference.”
Democrats who think that the chaos and polarity of the Trump administration isn’t already baked into the cake need to wake up and face the reality that 2020 will be an uphill battle.
Trump, like Hillary Clinton, was uniquely permanent in the public’s consciousness. By 2016, the electorate already had a hard impression of them both for at least a decade. While this surely hurts Trump’s ability to expand his appeal, it does give his approval rating a built-in floor. It would take something truly shocking — say the discovery of hard evidence that Trump committed a violent crime or an actual recording of him using the N-word — to shake his base. Despite the lamentations of Ann Coulter, voters have more fealty to Trump than they do to a wall.
The public expects Trump’s petty Twitter spats and tasteless sycophancy to some of the worst dictators on planet Earth. The overwhelming majority of the country may personally dislike him, but you don’t change horses midstream, and even if this race includes more bells and whistles than any before, the velocity isn’t accelerating. It’s chaos, constantly.
None of this even brings up the matter of whom Democrats nominate. Sure, Trump would surely face a tough battle against someone like former Vice President Joe Biden, who has crossover appeal and is largely trusted by the public, but there’s a very real chance that Democrats nominate a candidate who want to abolish private healthcare, pass a federal jobs guarantee, ban all assault rifles, legalize abortion in the third trimester, and tax everything from your estates to your wealth. In that case, does the pivotal center of the country vote for the Democrat who wants to bring the country halfway to Venezuela, or do you hold your nose and vote for the devil you know, accepting terrible tweets and pathetic public displays in exchange for relative domestic tranquility and the government staying out of your life?
Voters in 2016 proved they were willing to accept a president who openly disdained political norms and social graces. Democrats overplayed their hand and accused Trump not just of uncouth behavior, but criminal activity. If the Mueller report proves a dud, it’s hard to imagine an economic scenario that paves an easy path for Democrats to take back the White House.
