Trump can’t possibly win re-election, by Lion of the Blogosphere. Some readers aren’t going to like this argument, but it’s reasonably well thought out out. It’s by an anti-PC commentator in NY with a good, but not perfect, record.
It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of people who voted for Trump in 2016 and who are still alive will vote for him again. It doesn’t matter that prole whites who loved him in 2016 still love him in 2020.
Trump’s strongest support comes from senior citizens. Senior citizens die, and their vote gets replaced with young people who are a lot less white and even among the whites they are a lot more liberal and lot more anti-Trump than their grandparents.
Trump supporters continuously underestimate the power of fakestream media propaganda. With 24/7 anti-Trump reporting for four years, I don’t see how any people who voted for Hillary in 2016 are going to vote for Trump in 2020. Trump’s success in 2016 came from flipping the prole whites who traditionally voted Democratic, but I don’t see any more of those voters flipping in 2020.
College educated white voters with above-average household incomes, who have traditionally voted Republican because Republicans give them lower taxes, have been trending away from the Republican Party for the last two decades, and this trend looks to accelerate more in 2020. I have called these Republicans nose-holders, they vote Republican for the lower taxes while holding their nose so they don’t smell the stink of Republican policies they disagree with. Every year, more of these people stop being single-issue voters on taxes and flip to the Democratic side. And in 2020, the stink of Trump will be extra-strong to these voters.
Polls show potential Democratic challengers like Warren, Sanders or Biden with a huge lead over Trump, and even if 2% of that lead is composed of “shy Trump voters” who will vote Trump in 2020, that’s not enough for Trump to surmount what the polls are telling us.
Right now the economy is as good as it’s going to get. It can only get worse as the juice from the Trump tax cuts for big corporations and the top 1% wears off. Plus, if you look away from the stock market indexes, the economy isn’t very good for young people who didn’t graduate from elite colleges.
There’s a good chance a recession or slow down will come in 2020, unless the monetary authorities manufacture money more aggressively (as Trump is urging).
On the other hand, Trump keeps surprising everyone. The shy anti-PC vote might grow beyond the 2% we’ve seen in most recent Western elections. Maybe well beyond.
What if we all deliberately misinformed pollsters about our voting intentions, by telling them we were going to vote for the PC/left party and then doing the opposite?
What if the polls in the next US presidential election said Warren was going to win by 5%, but the Democrats lost? Or if at the next Australian election the polls projected Labor/Greens were going to win by 5%, and they lost?
In ten years time, how safe and overconfident would the Labor Party feel going into an election with a 20% lead?
