Hot Take #3: Trump Gets Blown Out

This may be the hottest take of all, but I’d like to emphasize that it’s NOT a prediction: Trump could get blown out in 2020.

It’s an article of faith (fear?) that political gravity doesn’t apply to Trump and that he will likely win re-election or at least make it a nail-biter. (I happen to believe/fear this, too. Fool me once....) But if we were to remove names and emotion and just look at the numbers and circumstances, we’d have to admit things look really bad for the incumbent.

Trump was never popular, but achieved the pinnacle of his success when he won 46.1% of the vote in 2016. That figure represents the highest mark he’s ever achieved in polling averages; just after the election, he was polling just below 46%. Within a month of taking office, it dropped to incredibly stable approval that sits in a narrow band between 38-42% (538) or 38-44% (Real Clear Politics). Trump has never enjoyed more than the support he did when he won election.

But these are national polls. If we look at state-level approval, things get a lot worse. I’m attaching a photo of the trendline in Arizona, which is typical. In most states, Trump enjoyed a momentary bump of support from people rallying around their new president, and then it dropped. In many states he started out with net positive approval and then settled into net disapproval—blue Oregon was one of these, for example.

The midterms were an inflection point, as you can see in this graph. His approval has worsened. In Arizona, after bouncing around at just slight disapproval for most of his presidency, the gap widened after the midterms to around -10%. (Trump won Arizona by 3.5% in 2016, getting 49% of the vote.) Arizona is not unique. Other states he won but is now underwater: North Carolina (-4), Ohio (-4), Pennsylvania (-7), Iowa (-12), Michigan (-12), Wisconsin (-13). If the election followed these ratings, Trump would lose the electoral college 328-210.

Polling a president’s approval rating isn’t the same as voting. A lot of the disapprovers are non-voters. So, okay, take the states where he’s underwater by a wide margin in the Midwest, and we’re right back to the dead heat. It’s easy to argue nothing has changed.

But while a reversion to the dead heat is possible, so is a turn in the other direction. Trump has very, very little margin for success. It took a series of breaks for him to squeak out a win in 2016 (controversial opponent, the electoral college, which allowed him to “win” with 3m fewer votes, Jim Comey, Russian bots, etc). When your ceiling is 46%, you need help, and Trump got every lucky break.

What if, on the other hand, instead of getting all the breaks, they go the other way? It’s not hard to imagine the economy taking a turn, a crisis emerging he’s ill-prepared to handle, or a worsening problem with his myriad scandals. Or just the banal reality of politics. After four years of Trump, are people more or less likely to vote for him, all other things being equal? He has run a base-only Presidency, and done absolutely nothing to appeal to a broader bloc of voters. In a more normal year, we could look at the map and envision a Democrat getting around 370 electoral votes—or even more in the huge wave that would result of a candidate got just the 42% of Trump’s high-average poll numbers.

Many of us are feeling a sense of despair that it doesn’t really matter what happens: voter suppression, dirty tricks (with or without Russia), the systemic rigging of the electoral college, Trump using the levers of government to suppress the vote, and on and on. (These are all my fears.) Because of his unexpected win and the grave consequences of his presidency, because the GOP has become so corrupt in undermining democracy, it seems unthinkable that he could lose in a landslide. But there is a scenario, and it’s not honestly that unimaginable, in which he just gets crushed. It is worth at least noting the possibility as we move through the next year and a half. Don’t bet on it, but don’t ignore it, either.