Must…resist…no, the urge is too strong.
There’s a way he can be President again, without changing the Constitution:
Get elected VP on a ticket where the Presidential candidate declines the job.
Make sure he packed the Supreme Court with enough justices who will rule, “Trump is eligible to be elected Vice-President under the 12th Amendment because he is eligible to hold the office of President, since the 22th Amendment only restricts how many times someone can be elected President.”
The problem is, both require 2/3 of the Senate (and, for the 25th Amendment, 2/3 of the House as well) to get anything done. He can be removed from power temporarily through the 25th Amendment, but he decides when he’s ready to return, and it takes 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate to challenge him on that decision.
Well I read how their are 20 contenders already for the 2020 democratic slot. Much better than “Shut up and do what you are told” Hillary was in 2016.
If Trump wins again will their be a major split among the democrats? Will democrats start to listen to the needs and desires of ALL the people, not just their Hollywood supporters and the liberals on the coasts?
I read after 2016 many top donors were fed up with the DNC and vowed to switch their support to local politicians and issues.
I agree probably only one worth considering. But as I (really did!) say a bunch of times on election threads in fall 2016, there is just no way to verify quantitatively the %'s he produces. That’s not taking a naive interpretation that he was ‘wrong’ just because the % was low but Trump won, but also there’s no way to know his % was really close to the real underlying one just because higher than most comparable prognosticators. There’s no way to disprove that Trump’s chance of winning might have been 50% or more. So definitely soon now, the question being how meaningful those %'s are even right before elections.
Also Trump won with, per most polls, an unusually high % of people who disapproved of him personally saying they’d vote for him anyway. And the actual result was a(n importantly) little bit better than polls said. Now one might argue now the disapprovals are of policy not the person…or maybe they aren’t really since to non-political junky/ideologues, ie most people, not a lot has really happened yet. Most people don’t like Trump and his BS. But that was already true in Nov 2016. And now Trump is the incumbent. I’m not sure he’s any less likely to win now. That said I’m not trying to contradict you as if sure you’re wrong. Probably less, OK maybe. It’s so uncertain.
Though of course it depends the opposition but that too is a complete open book. HRC is now tagged with the automatic ‘awful candidate’ designation which virtually ever loser is saddled with. And I’m no fan or hers. But looking objectively HRC had positives not every future Democratic candidate necessarily will. Such as being a long known quantity and, for some voters, the assumption she wasn’t really as far left as the Democrats in general have drifted and the things she was forced to say in the primaries. If the next Democrat is a more personally genuine but genuinely farther left person, I’m not sure they pick up ground on Trump all else equal. Though obviously all else won’t be equal since Trump will by then have a real record, even if little of it is known now, and all kinds of good/bad stuff could happen he didn’t really bring about but will tend to reflect on him.
Silver makes public predictions on the outcome in each state, along with the outcome of basically every other elected office for which there exists substantial polling. And he’s been doing so for well over a decade. There’s lots of data to verify the percentages he claims.
His excellent track record is far larger than simply “did he call the overall winner of the presidency correctly”.
I think anyone who wanted to run in the 2016 primary did. Those who didn’t run likely concluded Hillary was a tough opponent. I don’t recall “Shut up and do what you are told.”
I think the Democrats have listened to the needs and desires of ALL of the people. But I’m a liberal on the coast.
It’s a free country. I’m not a top donor, but I’ve given more to DNC affiliated groups since last November than I ever have in the past. I love my country too much to let any problems I have with the DNC stop me from doing everything I can to help them.
Not really. Even if you count all elections that’s not really a lot of data to verify a whole probability distribution. IOW to say how close to 65% of the time does the person win if Silver says they have a 65% chance of winning, but how close to 5% when he says they have 5% chance, how close to 35% when he says that, how close to 95% when he says that, etc. The binary yes/no’s for states or particular elections don’t show that. Besides which ‘Nate Silver predicted every state correctly’…starting with a map where everybody knows the outcome in 30 or more of them. He might be the best of such analysts, but there is not actually enough data to verify specific %'s to a close tolerance.
And that’s even assuming all types of elections are enough alike, or that the random process itself doesn’t change (the accuracy of poll and turnout models for) as politics changes, perhaps fairly rapidly.
I’d stick with what I said, no statistical proof Silver’s particular % likelihood for Trump winning was that close to the real underlying probability. Maybe Trump’s chance really was 1 in 4 (I think Silver had it there at some point not long before the election, I mean seriously we’re not going to say the day to day gyrations in those numbers mean anything are we?) and he hit it. Coming up heads two times in a row in a coin flip isn’t that bizarre…it happens 25% of the time. But this isn’t a coin flip with a known underlying statistical process. Trump’s real % chance of winning might have been significantly different than that. There’s no way to prove it wasn’t, and there never will be.
OK then to complete the thought 3% is completely pulled out of the air. There’s no way to know if Silver’s 30% was the real probability, and no solid basis to say it’s 10 times less now than whatever it was.
I don’t think trump will survive the current investigation. But if he does, and if he actually tries to run again there will be an ugly, ugly outcome… for him. jmho
Was John McCain viewed as an awful candidate? There was the Palin issue, but McCain himself, as far as I can recall, wasn’t viewed as a terrible candidate, although perhaps I’ve misremembered something.
I think that for me at least, a Trump victory in 2020 will provoke in me a similar reaction to that of his original victory in 2016. Pre 2016 I figured that there is no way we could be stupid enough to elect Trump. His election eroded my belief in Democracy and the American people by 50%. But now I have accepted that we are capable of electing someone like Trump and this erosion is baked in. I now think there is no way we can be stupid enough to elect him a second time, and if he were to be reelected I would simply lose the other half of my respect for Democracy and the American people.
All this is predicated on the assumption that the next three and a half years of Trump go pretty much the same as the first 6 months did. If for example Kelly reigns in the Whitehouse and Trump learns some humility and governing skills so as to become marginally competent (say GW Bush level) then it won’t affect me as much.
In terms of his chances (again assuming no massive improvement in performance, and no Jim Crow level voter disenfranchisement/fraud) I think they are very low. In my opinion one of the main reasons he beat Clinton was that no one expected him to. So since a Clinton victory was in the bag people were safe to stay home or even cast a protest vote for Trump. The second time around I think liberals won’t be as complacent. Secondly, Trump’s whole campaign was/is based on promising that he is the best at everything and once he was elected he would single handedly solve all the countries problems. This could work if no one actually saw him in action, but after 4 years of non-miracle working its going to be hard for him to keep making these claims and have anyone but his most devoted fans believe him.
As with Hillary, somewhat of a war-lover and a stubborn temperament indicated each would have no truck with foreign powers who didn’t know their place. Also if I recall, he suddenly veered to attacking Obama and many of the more liberal opinions he himself had previously espoused. Correctly, as it later turned out, he decided a GOP candidate must get the crazies on side.
Far better than Romney though.
This is my view mostly, but if Trump gets reelected it won’t bother me as much as his first election. Trump winning the election was like finding out your father is a pedophile. Trump getting reelected is like finding out your father is an alcoholic pedophile. It still stings, but the damage is done from the first trauma. Trump winning in 2016 pretty much destroyed my faith in the American people, him winning isn’t going to really affect it much worse. Also I have no faith in another Obama in 2020 to make us feel good about ourselves, because Trump proved a lot of this country is dysfunctional. I never felt that way about any other election I’ve seen or participated in, but this one really damaged my faith in this country and how competent we are. Lots of people feel that way.
But Trump has a lot of headwinds he didn’t have in 2016. In 2016 the democratic candidate was running for a 3rd term. Plus the dem candidate was unpopular with a lot of people. Plus there was a painful primary on the left and some liberals felt they’d rather stay home than not get all of what they wanted (less likely this time around). Plus a lot of dem voters probably stayed home because they felt hte election was preordained. Plus Trump could make empty promises and he had no record people could point to to evaluate if he could fulfill those promises. Plus while a lot of us who paid attention knew Trump was dangerously unstable before the election, a lot of low information voters didn’t and now the media reports on it so consistently that even they are noticing.
So his chances of winning again are low, but I never felt he’d win in the first place. So what do I know.
What no one has talked about here is the fact that the Electoral College isn’t going anywhere. Trump crushed Hillary 304 to 227. Its all about State by State voting.
If you think Trump is going to lose in 2020, what States are going to turn Democratic?
Those states that he won with a whisper thin majority, for starters. If you increase Democratic turnout by 1% in the Michigan and Pennsylvania, and by 2% in Wisconsin, Trump loses.
To put it in perspective, Bush’s biggest screwup was in foreign policy, specifically the Iraq War. But the Kerry (and most of the people the Democrats could come up with) couldn’t exploit this very well because he voted for the war. It’s hard to say “I’d do a better job on this than him” when you already endorsed ‘his’ actions. (Yes, hardcore Democrats try to say that a vote for the war don’t count as support for it, but Kerry didn’t need their votes, convincing undecided voters to vote D and republicans to stay home in disgust is what mattered)
Trump’s wins in a lot of states were by very narrow margins in an election with low turnout, in many cases there were more third party votes than the margin between Hillary and Trump. Slightly higher turnout and/or a mild shift in voting patterns is plenty to flip that result.
I think you did misremember. Or perhaps I should have qualified with the semi-obvious, ‘are viewed as awful candidates within their parties’. Democrats were feeling good after McCain’s and Romney’s defeats and had no particular reason to criticize them, if anything it would reflect badly on their guy to say he only beat ‘awful’ candidates. Likewise you didn’t see a whole lot of excoriation of Kerry by Republicans after 2004. But McCain was viewed extremely negatively by many Republicans after 2008 and ever since. In fact hating guys like McCain and Romney, that whole style and approach, is a lot of explanation of Trump’s success in the GOP. I doubt that would have been if that general style and approach had been able to win.