It’s entirely possible that the race ends in a 269-269 tie. Unlikely but possible if there are no delegate splits and if Trump wins OH, FL, IA, and WI but loses MI and PA.
On the bright side, his popularity has dropped measurably in Iowa and Arizona - yes, Arizona. By 28 points! Trump may have more territory to defend than the usual incumbent. That doesn’t mean he won’t be able to defend it, but just as there were some states that Clinton and Dems believe to be reliable in 2016 but weren’t, the same might be true for Trump heading into 2020.
My dream scenario is (and I don’t think I’m alone here):
Trump loses the election. By a wide, unmistakable margin. Senate flips. House becomes more solidly Democrat.
Trump tweets through December about how unfair it is… how illegals voted. How this is a “coup”. How people should take up arms to defend him.
… he’s roundly ignored.
Come January 20, Trump refuses to leave the Whitehouse. His own secret security staff remove him, dragging him along and out the door. Cameras are standing by to show the world the spectacle of Trump being bodily removed from the White House. He’s stuffed into a helicopter and flown away… far, far away.
If he loses, I’m betting that he skips the inauguration and just heads back to NYC on Jan 19. I cannot fathom him riding with his successor to the Capitol for the ceremony. Of course, I’d love to see him physically removed from the White House, and I’d be happy if it is in handcuffs or a strait jacket.
Take a look at the '60s~'70s, and how, after that era, Reagan’s policies have generally held pretty firm since then. In the past few decades, policies that are unhealthy for the country seems to ooze in and attempts to stem the seepage either get beaten back or beaten down.
Basically, it looks like it is much easier to fuck the country up than it is to make it less fucked up. We may be well and truly fucked.
During the campaign, I was telling MAGAsses who wanted Trump to disrupt the Washington system, drain the swamp, and stick it the Dems and “elites” and foreign friends and foes alike that any idiot with a book of matches can burn a house down. To rebuild a house you need an architect for the design, various types of contractors, permits and inspectors, materials, equipment, and time.
To get a sense of how something can go from a ridiculous, almost comical tweet to political reality, consider the recent case of Turkey, which is still, technically speaking, a democracy, but a flawed one at best.
Erdogan, who like Trump, once started out as a fringe candidate and eventually worked his way into the mainstream. He has done so by centralizing his powers and exploiting any and every loophole in the system to do so, and in some cases, simply ignoring laws along the way and essentially forcing his opponents to try and stop him.
Erdogan suffered one of his first defeats in the city of Istanbul, where his party lost a local election to an opposition candidate. So what was Erdogan’s response? He appealed to the national election board, and get the result cancelled because of “organized corruption” – whatever his allies on the board determine that to mean.
The US doesn’t have a national election board, but it does have states that can certify results, and it has an increasingly ideologically-driven and polarized Supreme Court. I’m not saying that the US and Turkey are identical case studies - far from it. But there are enough parallels that should make us understand that we’re a lot closer to this kind of misrule than we want to believe.
What sickens me about this isn’t the “two extra years” part – that just strikes me as hyperbole (although with this crew you never know).
No, I think the really sick part is the idea that the Mueller investigation was a failed coup – that a legitimate investigation carried out with the strictest observations of protocol and extreme respect for constitutional protections was actually an attempt to not just remove the president from office but to overthrow our entire government.
When you have 35% of the people believing that Trump = Real America and Anything Opposing Trump = Attack on Real America, then it’s not hard to imagine violence when he’s finally removed from office, by any means.
I think the 35% refers to his base, who will swallow whatever bullshit he feeds them. The 44% approval probably includes some voters who might be moderate conservatives or centrists. I’d actually put the number of true Trump cultists maybe around 25-30% but it’s somewhere in that ballpark.
A common first reaction to that question might be “nothing at all,” but I’m reminded of an incident in November, 2000. IIRC, there was a virtual siege around a building in Miami, Florida where ballots were being recounted.