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Some Reasons to Be Bullish on 2020

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It’s easy to bounce between the extremes of “Trump is toast and will be gone by week end” to “he’s going to actually repeat 2016.”  Assuming he is the 2020 GOP nominee, however, the latter is a very tall order.  Looking at the states needed to get to 270, their recent results and the Civiqs approval numbers, the Democratic nominee seems to start with a virtual lock on the 232 electoral votes won by Hillary Clinton on Election Night three years ago:

2016 Clinton States
StateEVs2016 Pres2018 House‘08-16 Weightedtrump approval
dc3D +86N/AD +89N/A
VT3D +26D +57D +42D +43
MA11D +27D +58D +41D +46
HI4D +32D +53D +40D +45
CA55D +30D +33D +30D +41
NY29D +23D +36D +29D +28
MD10D +26D +33D +29D +39
RI4D +16D +30D +26D +31
ME-11D +15D +26D +22N/A
DE3D +11D +29D +20D +17
WA12D +16D +28D +20D +33
CT7D +14D +24D +20D +23
IL20D +17D +22D +19D +28
NJ14D +14D +21D +17D +23
OR7D +11D +20D +16D +26
NM5D +8D +20D +14D +17
ME-AL2D +3D +14D +11D +14
VA13D +5D +14D +7D +11
MN10D +2D +11D +7D +13
CO9D +5D +10D +7D +14
NH4D +0D +11D +6D +21 (!)
NV6D+2D +5D +5D +19

Every single state has Trump underwater by at least 10 points and went blue in the 2018 total House vote by at least 5. Indeed, all but Nevada were double digits, and Nevada heavily disapproves of Trump. My weighted average of results includes the state’s Presidential results in 2008, 2012, and 2016 in a 1:2:3 ratio. As many have pointed out, the Trump approvals highly correlated with the 2018 House results. As the above (and below) charts show, his approval number has gotten even worse than the R vote in 2018, which was itself worse than both 2016 and the state’s lean over time. OK, those are the Clinton 232 votes.

What about the other 38 electoral votes? Well, 5 states (plus Maine’s 2d District which has its own electoral vote) totaling 64 electoral votes gave Democratic House candidates more votes than Republicans in 2018, and in each case, Trump is underwater on approval today (in the case of ME-02, I am extrapolating from the fact that the state as a whole is disapprove +14 and ME-02 was 12 points to the right of the state in the weighted average and was 13 to the right of the state in 2016):

First Opportunities (64 EV)
stateev2016 pres2018 house‘08-16 weightedtrump approval
mi16R +0D +8D +6D +4
wi10R +1D +8D +5D +4
PA20R +1D +10D +4D +5
IA6R +10D +4R +1D +5
ME-21R +10D +1R +1D +1-2
AZ11R +4D +2R +4D +7

Next up, there are an additional 3 states plus NE-2 (also an extrapolation given that the district is 23 points left of the state and Trump is +12 in the state) where Trump is underwater on approval. These states have an additional 61 Electoral Votes:

Next Opportunities (61 ev)
stateev2016 pres2018 house‘08-16 weightedtrump approval
fl29R +1R +2R +1D +1
NC15R +4R +2R +3D +6
NE-21R +2R +2R +3D +11
GA16R +5R +5R +7D +4

Florida is the perpetual heartbreaker and is and will remain a nailbiter. But look at the approvals in the others. Particularly North Carolina, where Trump is -6 and Dems may well have won the House vote in 2018 had there not been such an extreme GOP gerrymander leading Dems to field serious candidates in only 6 of 13 races.  Finally, both Ohio (18 EV) and Texas (38 EV) remain on the table; in both states, Trump won by less than 10 in 2016, Republicans won the 2018 House vote by less than 5, and Trump’s net approval is +5 or worse.  That is a universe of 181 winnable electoral votes of which we need only 38 (21%).

On the macro level, this doesn’t surprise me. It’s hard to imagine more than a handful of Clinton 2016 voters either approving of Trump now or voting for him next year. Because the younger voters are, the more Democratic they are, the fact that a slice of the older 2016 voters have died off and have been replaced by people born from 1995-99 gives Trump less cushion. And, there is undeniably a slice of 2016 Trump and 3d party voters planning on voting Dem following his performance. Hence, the drift of 2018 and approval numbers from the 2016 numbers.

Ultimately, Trump’s only chances to improve his odds (barring suddenly becoming more popular) are a major third party vote—even greater than the 6 percent or so in 2016—or winning the votes of people who disapprove of him because they also disapprove of the Dem nominee. Indeed, the latter is largely how he won in ‘16—exit polls showed that Trump won roughly 2/3 of the voters who disapproved of both him and Hillary Clinton. That is largely because he was an unproven outsider with no record onto which voters could project their hopes and give him the benefit of the doubt whereas Clinton was a universally known commodity inspiring uniquely strong views. That dynamic will be completely flipped in 2020. As the incumbent, Trump will be hard pressed to win people who disapprove of both candidates. Sure, he’ll get a slice (the I’ll-vote-for-an-actual-fascist-over-an-alleged-socialist vote). But that seems unlikely to put him over the top in many places. 


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