I think the 2012 election showed that the economy doesn’t mean as much to reelection as it used to. There were people citing stats like “No incumbent has reelected with a 7% unemployment rate” and yet Obama won it. Nowadays elections all seem to be about social media and how people feel about a candidate, not so much about tangible metrics like jobs or the stock market.
That was a particularly BS statistic to begin with. The actual number that was bandied around was 7.2% which was the highest rate of unemployment that any incumbant candidate was able to overcome prior to 2012. So it was presumed that any unemployment higher than that would doom the candidate. But take a look at the election that hit the 7.2% limit. It was Reagan vs Mondale, a 525 to 13 electoral vote blow out. The idea that the slightest shift in unemployment would have cause Reagan to lose 257 electoral votes is ludicrous. So it was clear even in 2012 that if there was a magical unemployment cut-point beyond which its impossible to win, that value was much higher than 7.2%.
Yes, he will.
Trump will be better organized this time. In 2016 did not have a good not have a ground campaign to work the phones and get out the votes. In 2020, he will. How much this matter is debatable, but if its a .5% increase in turnout, it will help.
As President, his perceived lack of experience weakness in 2016 will not apply. Now it’s his advantage.
He will have a long list of accomplishments to talk about:
A good economy
Tax cuts to the working, middle and upper class
Denuclearization talks with North Korea
Successfully negaitons with Mexico and Canda, with China ready to make
major concessions to buy USA good to make the trade deficit less.
Successfully placing two or perhaps three supreme court justices, keeping the promises he made by picking them from the list he provided the public in advance.
At this point, broder security is still an unknown. My hunch is Trump will find a way to get it done.
Above all else, his base is extremely loyal to him. He only needs to hold serve in the states he won in 2016 and can afford to lose either Ohio or Pennsylvania.
His best advantage might be the weak Democratic field.
I think it depends on if he gets a credible primary challenger (which the GOP seems intent on making sure doesn’t happen). I think they are well aware that incumbents that lose typically have had strong primary challengers, which blunts the incumbent advantage significantly. I think a big part of the advantage is the aura of inevitability and inertia, as state above. When the President looks weak by having to fight off a strong challenger it can significantly harm that aura.
That said, with 80+% of GOP primary voters not just liking, but downright loving Trump, I’m not sure how a credible primary challenge could be launched.
So ultimately, I vote “yes” to the OP question - with the big caveat that there is certainly a level of general unpopularity in which the incumbent advantage isn’t enough to save him.
Trump won the election 302 electoral votes. Clinton only had 227.
Clinton a political machine was essentially running for president for eight years, and greatly outspent Trump on a 2 to 1 basis. $639,635,565 to $302,488,918.
It doesn’t matter what margin Clinton won California and New York. Saying Clinton won the popular vote is like saying my football lost 28-20, but we our quarterback passed for more yards than theirs.
Lost in the weeds is fact Trump won 22 of the top 25 states with the highest birth date.
Ordinarily, I’d say you have a point with the 2 term rule. But- we’ve never had anyone in office this corrupt, this incompetent, this stupid, or this bigoted. We’ve never seen anything remotely like this piece of shit. Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin flip back to blue next year. Providing the piece of shit isn’t out of office and on trial.
You missed a few states he has to hold - Michigan and Wisconsin. Ohio is way down the list of potential Democratic pickups (I would rate Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina as higher).
I would add that all three of PA, MI, and WI were won by Trump by less than 1% (less that about 0.75% actually) in 2016. So he really can’t afford to perform any worse in 2020 than he did in 2016 at all or he will lose.
It boils down to “does the incumbent advantage overcome any degradation in support relative to 2016?”.
If you’re going to make predictions about how people are going to vote in the future, you have to understand how they voted in the past. And I’ll admit I can’t do that; I can’t imagine any mindset that would make it possible for somebody to choose Donald Trump as somebody to vote for. The fact that sixty-three million did that is something I can’t understand. So obviously, my mind does not encompass the entirety of the American electorate. (This works both ways. There are plenty of conservatives who cannot comprehend how millions of people chose to vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.)
Having said that, I think Trump’s chances of re-election are worse than a normal incumbent’s.
First, Trump only came in second in 2016. He barely won and he can’t afford to lose any of the voters he had. But I think Trump’s popularity is heading the other way. He’s more likely to be losing people who voted for him in 2016 than gaining people who didn’t.
Second, Trump’s record. Trump was able to run on a lot of promises in 2016 and nobody could hold him accountable for that. But now he’s been President and people are going to be asking how well he did on fulfilling the promises he made in 2016. And I think the record will show he did very badly.
Third, Trump’s stature. Somebody once said that the big advantage of being the incumbent is that you look like the President. You’re living in the White House, you’re surrounded by all those officials and staff, you’re on the news, you’re doing Presidential stuff in public. People are used to thinking of you as being a President. But the guy running against you has none of that. He’s asking people to imagine him as President.
I feel that Trump does poorly at this. He doesn’t act Presidential. At best, he acts like he’s still a candidate running for President.
Fourth, the investigations. They exist. And even if nothing further comes out beyond what has already happened, they raise questions. People are going to suspect that with all this smoke, there must be some amount of fire somewhere. Politicians know this; they launch investigations they know are frivolous because they know the mere fact that an investigation is going on hurts its target. And the current investigations have produced enough results to show that they aren’t just frivolous. A lot of people are going to be thinking, “Well, maybe Trump is innocent. But he might be guilty. Why take a chance?”
So I think Trump’s base will stick with him. But his base isn’t big enough to get him re-elected and I think he’s going to have a hard time convincing voters outside of his base to vote for him a second time, much less convince voters who didn’t vote for him in 2016 to do so in 2020.
Economic growth is projected by the CBO to be somewhat anemic for 2019 (2.3%) and downright low for 2020 (1.7%) cite, at least in comparison with Trump’s promised 3% growth.
I think the state of the economy may not help him as much as the GOP hopes.
It’s true that winning the popular vote doesn’t guarantee an Electoral College win. But the popular vote has a strong influence in how the Electoral College votes. So only a fool would dismiss the popular vote in their plans.
To use your football analogy, a team can score more touchdowns than the opposing team and still end up losing the game. But it would take a foolish coach to think that this means touchdowns don’t matter and he doesn’t need to make any plans for scoring them or for preventing the other team from scoring them.
:dubious: