Someone else is going to have to confirm for me that pollsters interject their partisan sentiments into their questioning. Because the thought of professional organizations doing so boggles my mind as much as the idea of people being unwilling to voice their true feelings to pollsters.
I believe the Shy Trump Voter exists but in insubstantial numbers.
No, demographic shifts require him to do a little better. Something like three million of his 2016 voters will be dead by next November. The Dems haven’t lost nearly as many to Father Time and the first time voters replacing them favor Not Donald Trump by 30+ points.
I think you mean something slightly different – “all he has to do is hold serve” or something like that and I get that. The voter distribution is the main reason he has about a fitty-fitty chance.
I believe there is a much larger silent-Trump supporters than the polls suggest. At this moment I’d say his re-election chances are 60-40%. He is in his element on the campaign trail and that can take away the distraction of a dis-functioning White House once election season is in full swing.
And this time he is not running after eight years of Obama, he is not running against Hillary, he is not running as the change candidate. Every single factor that allowed him to pull out the unlikely victory has basically been flipped around on him.
We can talk about whether the Bradley Effect is widely thought to be a real thing, but the effect is not attributed to any misbehavior by pollsters.
Agreed. He got in on the strength of “I would vote for anyone except Hillary.” Will that work a second tome? Maybe. Biden looks like he is just an experienced old hack, and the voters don’t want that. The Dems need to come up quickly with a viable candidate with charisma and plans for reform, and no, not Bernie, he doesn’t qualify except maybe as an experienced old hack.
Much as I shudder at the thought of Our Donald getting back into office, there are several reasons why he might do it - albeit probably with a very narrow margin:
But I won’t vote yet.
So is incumbency an advantage or a disadvantage?
“Change” is attractive to many. Obama won bigger as the change agent than as the incumbent. Trump also won as a change agent, in his case a now for something completely different agent. Can he sell that now? He’ll try to.
The D side cannot let him control the narrative. Wealth inequality is worse than ever. He’s not drained the swamp he’s filled it with toxic waste. He’s divided the country worse than it was. We are ill-prepared to handle the next downturn and those newly with jobs are rightfully still insecure about their futures. Few are on course to be able to retire and many will be handicapped by education debt for decades.
Make him defend. Define him as what needs to be changed, as the swamp incarnate.
Seriously? He and/or his “best people” have already engaged in multiple activities which, committed by a Clinton or any Democrat, would have been blown up into DEFCON-2 scandals by the Fox News party. We have a 400-page report documenting activity that any GOP congress would have used to launch immediate impeachment proceedings against any Dem president.
Short of being caught on video handing Putin $100 billion in cash along with the nuclear launch codes, while simultaneously sucking the man’s dick and signing a notarized affidavit stating he knew all along evangelical Christians were idiots who would fall for his bullshit, no scandal is going to hurt his election chances.
Very scary that SDMB folk, a group obviously CONSIDERABLY smarter than the national average, has it so close.
I actually am for whatever makes the price of bitcoin go up.
Maybe constant chaos that doesn’t damage infrastructures?
To elaborate, what I am saying is all he has to do is carry the same states as before. I believe he has a greater than 50% chance of doing just that.
Nothing has been flipped around at all. He still plays the outsider card and the people who voted for him LOVE it. He continues to invoke Obama and Hillary as the enemy and it will soon shift to whoever the Dems nominate. His voters believe he is fighting the Deep State and evil Liberals. Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie are all evil Libs trying to enslave decent, gun-toting, white Christians.
He blames the Democrats for any failure he encounters or anything bad that happens in the lives of his supporters. It’s all Nancy and Chuck’s fault. They try to block him at every turn and must be destroyed! His fans eat that shit up. If it means more liberal or Democrat tears they go crazy for him. They don’t care about Russia or the Mueller report. Their hatred of Obama, Hillary and all things Democratic has only grown since DJT won.
All the factors that allowed him to pull it off in 2016 are still there and unless the Democrats get smart he will do the exact same thing in 2020.
Actually, that seems to be exactly what the voters* do* want.
(Bolding mine)
Yes, his supporters love all that crap, but they’re not the ones Dems need to win over to win the WH in 2020. All we need is maybe 100,000 voters in key states who sat out 2016 (or maybe voted for Trump as a potential change agent) to recognize what he really is and vote for the Dem nominee.
Based on 2018, that’s not only possible but likely.
Yeah. Democrats tend to eat each other. Case in point, Biden illustrates his ability to get things done, in the past, with other politicians with whom he strongly disagreed using some old Dixiecrat segregationists as an example. What happens? He gets called out for his racial insensitivity by some of his opponents and an apology is demanded. They ignore Joe’s point entirely and completely overlook his commitment to civil rights just to score some political points. I consider that a rather low blow.
I agree with you, but you seem to be leaving out the many stupid, angry white females that will vote for him as well. Idiocy knows no boundaries.
Piling on Akaj’s post. Those people are maybe a bit more than a third of the voters, and not all of the people who voted for him.
Others just wanted to go with what was behind door number 2. They had no idea what Trump would actually be like or do but they wanted to go with something … different.
The one significant change is within the Obama-Trump voter block, the voters who really delivered Trump the election in those critical midwest states. Not a huge change but the movement is still significant.
Not as big of a shift as I’d hope to see though.
More real, not huge, but still significant movements.
Pew divides up Trump voters. 59% are the enthusiasts. They liked him then and they like him now. 23% were converts. They did not love him, often preferred Cruz or such, but they mostly came around and stayed warm to him. Of the 46% who voted for him these are his floor of support (comes to about 38% of those who voted). The other two groups are the skeptics, 12% of his voters, who have turned a bit colder to him, and the 6% disillusioned, who were warm and are now cold. That’s 18% of his support (8% of those who voted) that is if not poachable at least a bit more likely to stay home. Someone who is able to demonstrate that they actually care about and understand their very real problems and challenges could get at least a few points of them.
2018 level enthusiasm may not be sustainable but 2020 is highly likely going to see more than 2016.
It’s hard to say and I am reluctant to make a firm prediction, but from my POV today Trump is ever-so-slightly the favorite, so 55-45% likelihood that he is reelected. Still, that’s really based on nothing other than the fact that most incumbent presidents are reelected, so Trump is favored by default if nothing else. Now, if you factor in any potential cheating that he, his DOJ, and Republican states may do during the election - not to mention the possibility that Russian meddling might lead to ACTUAL vote-switching - then his odds may skyrocket.
The thing is, though, I think he has basically no chance at winning the popular vote, but because of the EC he could still win anyway. If that were to happen then we are all going to run headfirst into a legitimacy crisis of the US government.
Yeah, this is making me nuts. Biden is talking about a time when even people who hated each other in private could work together in public. That was a Good Thing. Today’s young lawmakers seem to think that standing with your arms folded, shouting “NO!” year after year is the way to get things done.
One of the reasons I think Trump is favorite to be re-elected is his personality. He has made more people political when not that long ago being apolitical was trendy.
A lot of it is people in outright opposition but you can’t forget the new followers who buy into him.
Trump is a brand. He is a self-promoter and he does it very well. Some see him as a nefarious product of nepotism and deceit. Others see him as a fighter who doubles down in the face of criticism and is anti-PC.
If you actually look at what he has done in legislative success, it’s nothing a President Ted Cruz wouldn’t have done. But Cruz is boring. He might have got more done, but he wouldn’t have a cult of following dedicated “to own the libs”. He wouldn’t sell out arenas in super quick time. Trump like it or not does because of personality. They buy into him, not necessarily the Republican Party.
In 2020 there will be people voting against him because they despise the man and his politics. There will be those who vote for him holding their nose up at the man but voting for his politics. And there will be those who vote for him without a care about politics but because the man is bombastic and entertaining.
Personality matters a lot to many voters more than policy and rationale behind policy.
Excellent post and if only the Democrats and whoever they nominate are smart enough to follow this or a similar game plan. I have very little faith they will.
The part I bolded is pretty much what I have been preaching in this and other threads on this topic. And yet, I fairly certain the Democrats will manage to fuck this up just as Hillary did in 2016 because they just don’t get it.
And this mentality for absolute purity of thought and action for your entire life is why the Democrats are more likely to lose in 2020 than pretty much any reason. Trump is so clearly odious, vile and unqualified to be POTUS this shouldn’t even be a contest. BUT, this is all likely to play out in a way that turns off and alienates the very voters they need to persuade to vote for them in 2020.
He will win.
I remember listening to a pollster being interviewed on the Axios podcast about the unexpected results of the Florida elections in 2018, and he had his own theory that there is indeed a silent Trump voter not being captured in polls. There isn’t any Bradley effect going on- these people are deliberately lying to pollsters because they don’t trust them and they know inaccurate polling only helps Trump. He pegged the number of liars as 2% of poll responders in Florida, which is more than enough to covertly flip a state into the lean-red column.
Even if his low approval numbers are real, so what? Ronald Reagan’s approval rating was in the low 30s through much of his first term (and he was even shot)… just look how that turned out.
Trump has an apparently good economy to point to, and that’s all that ultimately matters.