A consensus appears to be coming together on the Right that President Trump is headed to reelection in 2020. And why not? Republicans are united behind Trump and Democrats are fighting among themselves, as usual.
I don’t buy it. Trump may wind up winning, but at this point, his chances of a second term are no better than 50-50. Instead of a clear path to victory, he has two roadblocks in his way.
The first is the chunk of the GOP coalition that took a hike in the midterm election last November. Those who stayed home or voted for other parties’ candidates consisted of soft and moderate Republicans and independents who more or less lean Republican.
It wasn’t Trump’s agenda that caused them to cut and run. It wasn’t his insistence of building a wall to block illegal immigrants or his criticism of free trade. It was Trump himself. They were motivated by the sheer dislike of him personally.
There may not be mounds of data that prove this was the case. But if nothing else, the location of Democratic breakthroughs indicates it’s what happened. USA Today found that more than 80 suburban counties and cities where Republicans had been dominant switched to voting Democratic in 2018.
Suburban Republicans tend to be politically squishy, but they’ve voted for conservatives from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush in the past. So it wasn’t Trump’s embrace of the GOP agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and conservative judges that spooked them. It was the man himself. His personality was to blame.
The question now is whether Trump can win this bloc of Republican voters back. I’m dubious. From all appearances, Trump doesn’t think he’s got a crucial job of persuasion facing him. He doesn’t need a personality transplant, but a softening of his image would help. Those who’ve spent time with Trump privately know how likeable he can be. Likeability will work in public, too. It certainly did for Reagan, Eisenhower, and JFK.
Political analyst Joel Kotkin believes Trump’s style is stunting the party’s growth. “Trump’s intemperance, jingoism and lack of political skills have undermined the GOP’s ability to reach beyond its base in the South, the exurbs, and parts of middle America,” he wrote in February.
Charles McElwee, a Pennsylvania political writer, came to a dire conclusion for Republicans shortly after the midterm election. It revealed “a deep geographical realignment along socioeconomic lines, rather than the cyclical repudiation of the dominant political party,” he wrote in City Journal.
If Kotkin and McElwee are right — and I think they are — it will be difficult for Trump to win states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that he captured by tiny margins in 2016. And he’ll be in trouble in numerous states that were merely close: Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, for example.
The second roadblock to a Trump triumph is Democrats. As ridiculous as they often act these days, they’re likely to pull together once they pick a nominee. Then they’ll line up behind the candidate because that’s what beating Trump will require. For Democrats, Trump will make party unity easy to achieve.
The #Resistance has been a failure in Washington. It’s a huge body of activists — progressives, socialists, and mainstream center-left party regulars — that is bigger than anything Republicans will able to deploy. In a presidential campaign, it can become a significant asset.
I’ve been amazed at the turnout in Iowa and elsewhere for appearances by Democratic presidential candidates. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the soak-the-rich enthusiast, draws big crowds to her speeches, and it’s not because they’re political masochists. They’re eager to listen to policy speeches. That’s evidence of how hungry Democrats are to win in 2020.
At the moment, polls tell us little about who may emerge as the nominee. When the 24 Democratic candidates gather for two debates in late June in Miami, we’ll begin to get an idea, but not much of one. The first serious event in the presidential race is the Iowa caucuses next Feb. 3.
Trump’s reelection prospects depend heavily on the quality of his Democratic rival. He is said to think that Warren would be the easiest opponent to beat. He might be right about that. But the likelihood of her nomination is small.
There are at least four or five others who are capable of beating Trump: Joe Biden for one, Bernie Sanders for another, Pete Buttigieg possibly, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock perhaps, even Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.
For Trump, it doesn’t matter. Beating Hillary Clinton was a piece of cake. In 2020, the Democratic presidential candidate, whoever it is, will be a lot harder to beat.
Fred Barnes, a Washington Examiner senior columnist, was a founder and executive editor of the Weekly Standard.
