The 2020 election cycle is very, very far away but some Democrats aren’t as confident that Donald Trump can be easily bumped off. Heck, they may be the case for the entire Democratic base. Why do you think they’re clamoring for impeachment? It’s the quickest and most immediate way to remove him from office—so they think—and if it’s successful, yes—Mike Pence doesn’t have the draw of the Trump train. He would probably lose, but impeachment won’t be successful. And while the Left lusts for such a fight, jobless claims have dropped to its lowest levels in a half-century, unemployment has dipped below four percent, wages are up, economic growth is solid at three percent, and the jobs are bountiful. There are more jobs than there are job seekers. Oh, I’m just being suffocated by this white nationalist agenda…my eyes cannot roll any harder at that tired, absurd, and wholly ridiculous liberal talking point.
The thing about Trump is that people like his policies. He scores pretty well on handling the economy, it’s just that his personality doesn’t register high. Yet, at the end of the day, Trump gets stuff done, which is more than what you can say about the Democratic Party over the past ten years. With a solid economy and the power of incumbency, Steve Rattner, a Treasury official under the Obama administration who was a top adviser during the auto bailout, threw some cold water on the Left’s 2020 hopes, noting the power of the incumbency and the state of the economy are keys to determining outcomes. In this case, that would be advantage Trump—and he’s not the only one. Rattner uses Yale professor Ray Fair’s model, which predicted the outcomes for 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections. Mark Zandi, another economist, has looked at a dozen other models as well. All of them have Trump winning re-election (via NYT):
The economy invariably ranks among the top issues on the minds of voters in presidential elections. At the moment, it appears to offer President Trump a meaningful tailwind.
[…]
But how big is that tailwind? Fortunately, economists have worked hard to develop models for predicting election outcomes, and according to one of the best of these, it should be quite large.
One of the first — and perhaps still the best — of these models was created by Ray Fair, a professor at Yale. He found that the growth rates of gross domestic product and inflation have been the two most important economic predictors — but he also found that incumbency was also an important determinant of presidential election outcomes.
[…]
It’s worth noting that the Fair model is hardly alone in its forecast. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has looked at 12 models, and Mr. Trump wins in all of them. Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics has reached the same conclusion in his examination of the Electoral College.
So the question for 2020 may well be whether Mr. Trump can overcome the majority of voters’ poor perception of him and use a good economy and incumbency to win re-election.
Over at Hot Air, Ed touched on this piece and another by Bret Stephens, who also noted Trump’s likely re-election next year:
The problem isn’t Trump as much as it is the extreme nature of his opposition. Around the globe, progressives are on the retreat thanks to their inflexibility and their inability to connect to the common people who cast those votes.
And by peddling gun bans/confiscation, late-term abortion, high taxes, free college, free health care, and political correctness—they’re doing a helluva job in trying to not connectwith…normal people
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