Prediction: Trump wins re-election in 2020

[GIGObuster]

@Okrahoma

Not that the popular vote matters but:

Compared to 2012

Nationwide, Trump got ~2M more votes than Romney
Nationwide, Clinton got ~90K less votes than Obama.

You are right, I was looking at the early results. In any case, even Obama did get more votes than Trump.

[phantom_lamb]

@GIGObuster

Huh, and here I thought that we needed only to convince less than 1% of the people in a few battleground states. Oh wait, we do.

I think you are forgetting that it was not only Trump supporters that made him win, but that a very significant number of Democrats did not vote. And some misguidedly voted for him. One sobering thing to remember is that Trump won with almost the same number of voters that voted for Romney in 2012. IMHO a lot of of those, and independents that did vote for Trump were the kind of people that needed to see by themselves that the warnings that many were telling them about Trump was not just politics.

Trump and the Republican congress are producing that evidence fast and furiously.

Of course I hope you are right, but if these voters didn’t turn up THEN, then I doubt they would ever turn up for anything even if their lives depended on it (seriously, how much more crucial can an election have been than the one in 2016?). In the meantime, surely the Republican majority in congress and president Bannon will work out ways to suppress voter turnout come 2020.

[CarnalK]

@GIGObuster

You are right, I was looking at the early results. In any case, even Obama did get more votes than Trump.

You’re not the only one. A lot of people around here cling to these “early results” of low voter turnout as the reason for Hillary’s loss.

[Belowjob2.0]

The massive protests and the on-going Russia scandal will damage Trump far too much for him to be viable in 2020.

[Belowjob2.0]

http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/business/trump-again-hires-foreign-workers-for-mar-lago-little-change-pay/NtHozFcFMZXQWVkErxSdhM/
Eventually, everyone will realize that the America first rhetoric is just a con game.

However, hiring workers from abroad seems to contradict Trump’s public pronouncements. The president-elect has publicly shamed Carrier Corp., Ford Motor and others for their decisions to move manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

Neither Trump’s transition team nor Mar-a-Lago’s manager responded to requests for comment. During a March presidential debate, Trump defended his hiring of foreign workers.

“It’s very, very hard to get people,” Trump said. “Other hotels do the exact same thing.”

CareerSource Palm Beach County, a nonprofit job placement agency, says it knows plenty of American citizens willing to work at Mar-a-Lago.

“We have hundreds of qualified candidates and hundreds of job orders for various hospitality positions such as servers, chefs, cooks, bartenders, housekeeping, guest services, spa services, recreation, maintenance and more,” CareerSource spokesman Tom Veenstra said.

[Corry_El]

@tim314

I fully expect Trump to keep on doing horrible things for the next four years. But if none of those horrible things cause anyone who voted for him to change their mind, then he at least has an awfully good chance at being re-elected. What’s he going to do that will actually cost him any of the votes he won in 2016?

Some of the reasons people voted for Trump in the general election include (in no particular order):
[ol]
[li]He was the candidate most likely to put pro-life justices on the Supreme Court[/li][li]He was the candidate most likely to support the agenda of the Congressional Republicans[/li][li]He’s an immigration hard-liner[/li][li]He says things which are politically incorrect[/li][li]He pisses off the “coastal elites”[/li][li]He’s openly critical of Islam and Muslims.[/li][/ol]

In general once you get elected president, you’re the favorite in the next election. Maybe too elementary to say, but historically true. And some people seem to assume it’s somehow the opposite with Trump, because he’s such a train wreck and his policies are so wrong…except they used the same reasoning to say he’d get crushed in the election last November.

There are plenty of ways Trump could screw himself for re-election, and plenty of outside factors that could do it to him also (principally a recession, they always happen sooner or later and aren’t necessarily or even typically the product of the current admin’s policies, you still get blamed). But yours is a basic list that needed more emphasis on this forum during the campaign. Especially the last 4 are the more popular positions in the country from what I can see, to actually motivate people to vote one way or the other and support for them isn’t limited to Republicans or people who agree with the traditional GOP on more substantive issues like tax/spend/size of govt. On the first two it’s more traditional left/right, but that’s fairly evenly divided.

I don’t expect a shift against Trump’s positions big enough to offset the general advantage of incumbency in running to keep the WH. And the Democrats seem to be shifting further left on bigger issues and more ‘PC’ on those last 4 issues, further from the center. Again Trump absolutely can lose, or even not make it as far as even running again, but I’d also put the mid point of the distribution of various 2020 outcomes as ‘Trump gets re-elected fairly narrowly’.