Early Prediction: Trump Wins in 2020
Longtime readers of this blog know two things about my predictions: I make them mostly for the fun of it, and some of them actually turn out to be wrong. But “wrong” was not the word for my prediction of the Republican win in 2016. I was right — even though I made that prediction 2.5 years ahead of the election, in May 2014. Not only did I predict a Republican win, but I bet, in addition, that the victory would be due especially to “key international issues” — which, especially if you include immigration and trade, was pretty close to the mark.
Trade is the provocation for today’s addition to my list of predictions. We are once again more than 2.5 years ahead of the presidential elections of November 2020, so it’s about time for me to roll the dice and say Trump will win. And, once again, I’ll attempt to sum up my reasoning in a single term. This time, what will put Trump over the top will be, not international affairs, but personality.
I mention trade because of Trump’s announcement, on March 1, 2018, of an intention to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and the consequent media anxiety about foreign retaliation resulting in trade wars. I don’t know that he will stick to his original announcement — that he will, in fact, impose 25% tariffs on steel and 10% on aluminum imports from all countries. But most likely the announcement was, and the outcome will be, calculated to appeal to what the Washington Post (Phillips, March 2, 2018) described as the “majority of Americans” who consider free-trade agreements “more harmful than helpful.”
The topic of trade thus reminded me that an incumbent president has many ways to impress voters. By accident or by design, Trump’s first year demonstrated that he was at least approximately correct when he said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” That is, he seems to have established, in 2017, that he could be completely unpresidential, bigoted, perhaps even mentally unstable, and yet, even in the worst moments, he would still command the allegiance of at least one-third of voters — more, by the way, than Adolf Hitler achieved in the first round of voting in 1932.
The graph here, showing the FiveThirtyEight composite of polls since his inauguration, suggests that the drama and craziness of Trump in 2017 may simply have established a baseline. It is possible, in other words, that he is learning the job, getting better at impressing people, and at the same time outliving some of the initial disgust with his words and behavior. It appears that people may have grown used to him, that in 2018 they may pay less attention to the previous year’s never-ending flow of reports on how he was ridiculous, or unbalanced, or sexist, or evil.
If that’s how it goes, then I’ll have to admit to being wrong in my prediction, a year ago, that he would be out of the White House by yearend 2018. That no longer seems likely. The reasoning used there — that there would be “very major missteps” and that he would “frighten people” (more than he had already done) has not been borne out. I admit, I was swayed by the hostility of the media toward this decidedly unorthodox president. That experience, and (e.g., 1 2) others in 2017, helped me to consider more carefully what “everyone” supposedly thinks.
To my credit, I rebounded with a forecast (August 22, 2017) that the Republican Party would win the White House in 2020. Its reasoning remains credible, a half-year later. A brief review of articles at this point suggests that Democrats are still captivated by the identity politics mindset that continues to divide the party and alienate many voters, and that their prospects in the 2018 congressional midterm elections are thus much less auspicious than one would have expected at this point, given what the New York Times et al. have been saying about Trump for the past year and a half. If it is true that the Republicans have forgotten how to govern, after so many years of obstructionism and silliness, then perhaps it is also true that liberal media have forgotten how to write about Republicans, after so many years of assuming that of course everyone accepts what journalists take for granted.
In a later post (October 11, 2017), assessing Trump’s pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio — another cause of enormous liberal fulmination carrying little actual weight — I suggested that
Trump probably sensed that the Arpaio pardon could highlight the power of his office and his willingness to use it, and that the outcome would contribute to a growing recognition that, far from relinquishing such power, he intends to expand it, and may succeed in doing so.
Such an impression seems consistent with the suspicion that, as one might expect, Trump is growing into the job. But what about the Mueller investigation and Trump’s other legal problems and scandals? Briefly, the outcome will probably be determined by politics rather than law. I don’t know that Republicans in Congress, or a relatively conservative Supreme Court, would ultimately vote to remove him, particularly if he is delivering popular solutions and/or has helped the Republican Party to retain a better-than-expected position in the 2018 midterms. I don’t even know that Democrats in Congress would want such an outcome, if Vice President Mike Pence is the alternative. Nor can I be confident that a critical mass of voters would ultimately be swayed by such matters. Voters may care deeply about Mueller’s exploration of possible Russian interference in the 2016 election — but the trends in the polls do not seem to say so.
When I say Trump will win in 2020 due to personality, what I mean is that he may persuade additional millions of people that he is almost as special and remarkable as he considers himself to be. A year ago, I would have thought that impossible. Now I am not so sure. I was surely surprised to find myself understanding why his supporters could consider him statesmanlike, in his approach to the clash between extremists of left and right at Charlottesville in August 2017. His handling of that event, burnishing his image among his followers, does not seem to have hurt him among voters generally. To the contrary, his ratings have gradually if unevenly trended upwards since then.
At least I would say that, if Trump wins in 2020 despite the many stupid and destructive things that he seems bent on doing, it will surely be because many people feel that he is a man of action, or a man of the people, or a great defender of America, or is in some other way very different from other politicians. Well, of course, he is: we already know that. I guess the key point would be that his amateurish differentness would be perceived as superior.
This is, of course, a very early forecast and, as I say, it is for discussion purposes. So I won’t continue, here, to try to persuade the future of how it should turn out. If I do prove to be right, of course, it will be unnerving to consider that I might actually understand Trump — that my (1 2 3) posts about him and his campaign in fall 2016 could reflect an ability to think like him. I console myself with the thought that it will take a longer and more consistent track record of Trump forecasts to demonstrate any such thing.
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Ideas, Predictions & Advice 
Dahlia Lithwick (Slate, April 16, 2018) illustrates the point of this post: “For those who wondered what it would look like to watch a somber, reflective adult human wander into a political cage match with a drunk dancing bear, we can now state definitively that the bear wins.” In other words, when a substantial chunk of the voting public wants circuses with its bread, Trump has some home-field advantages.
ScienceDaily (2018) reports on research suggesting that charisma (in the eyes of voters) may have been the key factor attracting voters to Trump despite his obvious deficits. I haven’t studied that article closely. It tentatively appears that their “attributed charisma” construct is approximately what I meant by “personality.”
An update: at the moment, pundits right and left are denouncing Trump as a failure. His rating in the FiveThirtyEight composite went down recently, due to the fiasco of his government shutdown for border wall funding. But, pundits notwithstanding, that rating has since rebounded, and is now very close to where it was (above) when I wrote this post, nearly a year ago. It’s still under 50%, to be sure — but bear in mind that this is not a poll of voters who are deciding whether they like someone else more than Trump.
In terms of this post’s focus on personality or charisma, the big question now is whether the Democrats will agree on a candidate who carries at least as much legitimacy as Trump. In other words, will s/he convey a gut sense of belonging in the White House? Bernie Sanders has that; he was a contender in the first place; he has slogged it out ever since; and he seems sincerely motivated by beliefs rather than personal ambition. But it is doubtful that the Democrats will accept a white male. And in that case, the question is, will there be anyone else who can make Trump look small? At this early point, when Democratic hopefuls are only starting to announce their candidacies, the answer is no. But we shall see.
At this point, 14 months before the election, it appears to be the Democrats’ to lose. If they don’t shoot themselves in the foot with proposals that alienate too many voters, my prediction of a Trump victory will be wrong. It’s hard to tell where the economy will be, but the appeal of Trump’s personality to his supporters still doesn’t seem to have wavered much. The American Conservative (Tonelson, 2019) says this may be because key groups have actually done better economically under Trump than they did under Obama — suggesting that I may again be making the mistake of listening too much to mainstream media. Maybe I’ve just been caught up in the attention paid to the various Democratic primary candidates.
Time for a yearend summary. According to the New York Times, the Democratic primary season starts in Iowa than seven weeks from now, with Super Tuesday four weeks after that, and the leading candidates are Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, and possibly Bloomberg. So much for my doubt that Democrats would accept a white male.
From that field, I’ll speculate that only Sanders or Buttigieg would come close to beating Trump. FiveThirtyEight says the percentages of Americans favoring and opposing impeachment are almost equal, but meanwhile his approval rating is stronger than it has been at any time since March 2017. For these purposes, the Democratic sound and fury of the past three years has been profoundly ineffectual. The party did well in last year’s midterm elections, but that probably would have happened anyway, in reaction to Trump’s policies. For purposes of beating Trump in 2020, the Democrats actually seem weaker than in 2016, when Bernie could have done it.
In a poll taken during the impeachment trial, today Gallup reported finding Trump at his personal best level of voter approval. He can only benefit from two subsequent developments: (1) his acquittal in the Senate, underscoring Republicans’ accurate claim that the Democrats have been struggling for three years to find some excuse to impeach him, and ultimately had the practical equivalent of “nothing”; and (2) the Democrats’ complete screwup of the Iowa caucus. I agree with Michael Bloomberg’s campaign: the latter (actually, both) will powerfully aid the credibility of the only viable Democratic presidential candidate who will not be tarred by association with that prime-time display of ineptitude. Take that as my follow-on bet that it will be Trump vs. Bloomberg — but I’m still betting Trump wins.
Added on February 19: Speaking of Bloomberg, The Bulwark (Rottner, February 18, 2020) says this:
[Bloomberg’s] rise in the polls has come from saturating the public with … [brilliant, expensive campaign ads,] not personal charisma. … [But now he] is going to have to show himself to the voting public.
Charisma! That was my follow-on bet — that Trump’s victory will be due to something that one might call charisma. Well, tonight is Bloomberg’s first debate against Democratic competitors. It should be interesting.
Since my last update, Bloomberg has had two disastrous debate appearances. There have also been numerous articles suggesting that, even if Bernie Sanders had a plurality of delegates, Democratic party bosses would be able (under the rules of the Democratic convention in July 2020) and were certainly intending to reject his candidacy, for fear that his radical left-wing policies and beliefs would give Trump a landslide in November.
Yesterday was Super Tuesday — that day in the primary season when the votes of one-third of all delegates are determined. Joe Biden did well, following his victory in South Carolina last week, after which two of his moderate challengers (Buttigieg and Klobuchar) pledged their delegates to him. It is presently not clear that Sanders will have even a plurality of delegates, going into the convention. It seems unlikely that he will have a majority.
Unless the party bosses use Biden to get rid of Sanders, and then replace Biden with someone more electable, the outcome will be that the Democratic Party has done it once again, with feeling: put forward someone like Biden, who is far inferior to Hillary Clinton on multiple levels, for fear of taking the bold step of encouraging Bernie’s insistence on more radical change.
A decision to pit Biden against Trump would provide another perspective on this post’s prediction that Trump will win due to charisma. It is not just that Trump has it. It is that the Democrats are determined not to.
[Update, March 12] Just a brief addition. Bernie self-destructed with praise for Fidel Castro and worse. Trump is trying to do the same with increasingly irrational and self-defeating responses to the coronavirus. Yesterday, he announced a ban on travel from Europe to the U.S. Meanwhile, Biden continues to dodder. With no ill will toward either Biden or Trump personally, it seems the situation of the U.S. would be much improved if at least one of them caught the coronavirus and was replaced by someone else. Because there doesn’t seem to be any other way in which America is going to have a presidential election worth participating in. Just, please, give us someone who could actually do the job.
Another post offers an impression of where things stand now, in the midst of the coronavirus.
Note my irregularly updated scorecard on issues for the 2020 presidential election.
Daily Reckoning (Rickards, 2020) claims to have predicted Trump’s victory in 2016, and now predicts his defeat in 2020 — because, he says, the polls hand Biden a substantial advantage nationwide and in key battleground states.
That may be. But I think we need to wait until the debates. I think some of Biden’s support will evaporate when he finally begins to speak. It certainly won’t be a landslide for Trump, but how he will really stack up against Biden in voter approval is far from clear.
P.S. (July 6) I should have mentioned a rising number of articles talking about a Biden win. This morning, Barron’s has an article titled, “What a Democratic Sweep Could Mean for the Market.”
The Federalist (Vaughn, July 13) contends that a poll not influenced by leftward media bias finds Trump and Biden each getting 47% of the popular vote, but Trump winning in the Electoral College. Vaughn says a key factor is that people are afraid to admit that they are going to vote for Trump, as evidenced by a poll question asking whether survey participants are comfortable with others knowing how they voted.
The almost unanimous view continues to be that Biden is headed for victory. It now sounds like Biden’s team is going to decline to participate in debates. That will hand Trump’s team an opportunity to present America with the uncomfortable choice of a president who may be senile on the day he takes office. That cannot help Biden. There also appears to be increasing extremism on the left, as rioters in Portland expand their attacks on law enforcement. By some signs, there is also a growing percentage of Americans who fear their jobs will be jeopardized if they say the wrong thing.
I’m not saying I’d bet even money on Trump at this point. But for purposes of this post’s speculation, it may yet come down to Trump rising to the occasion. I don’t rule him out. If the stock market doesn’t crash between now and November, I think he may pull it off. My present feeling is that that would help to improve the Democratic Party, but would be bad for the country.
The first debate has come and gone. The general reaction seems to be that it was painful to watch, as Biden and Trump interrupted and insulted each other. I watched only a few minutes. My impression is that it was a win for Biden in the sense that cognitive decline was not a significant issue.
In the debates, neither Biden nor Trump seemed very presidential. Biden may be losing the charisma or leadership contest. Or at least an opinion piece in The Hill contends that Biden is conveying a tone of weakness, fearfulness, and passivity.
Trump has just announced that he has the COVID-19 virus. We have yet to see whether that will make any difference.
It’s mid-October. With luck, we will have a confirmed winner three weeks from now. There’s been a lot of talk about a contested election going into the Supreme Court and being decided by Amy Coney Barrett (Trump’s recent nominee to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg), now being considered by the Senate. It seems clear that Republicans have been trying to suppress the vote — there’s only one ballot drop-off location in my county, home of ~2 million people.
Estimates at FiveThirtyEight have projected a steadily increasing likelihood of a Biden win since the end of August, in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. The timing there seems to coincide with a stock market reversal based on coronavirus resurgence when kids were going back to school (or not). In other words, it may have come home to many voters that COVID-19 was still not being handled well.
There has just been a New York Post article about Joe Biden’s son in Ukraine, signaling corruption, but I doubt that will carry enough weight to make a difference. With heavy early voting due to the virus, Trump — and the Republican party, which is apparently at risk of losing the Senate — are running out of time. That may explain the seemingly desperate voter suppression efforts.
On the other hand, one pollster who predicted Trump’s win in 2016 sees him winning again this year, citing some of the same methodological problems in the mainstream polls that he saw back then. And his concern for vote corruption is on the Democrat side, with voter fraud, rather than in what I see as voter suppression on the Republican side.
It occurs to me to add what the politics betting sites are predicting. New Statesman says that they are generally favoring a Trump victory, even as the pollsters favor Biden, but that betting markets are probably not as accurate as pollsters. At the moment, however, OddShark favors Biden, as do Bookies and PredictIt.
Well, things are certainly up in the air. Medium (Ellis, November 1) says the results of The Iowa Poll suggest that, in the words of the Des Moines Register, Biden’s lead “has faded.” Ellis says this is triggering fears among his backers that he is “an especially weak candidate” and not “a closer” — that “victory could slip from his grasp.” Ellis says Biden’s results in the poll “foretold close results in Wisconsin and Minnesota” and “undermined the Biden campaign’s momentum and morale.” Until that poll, according to Ellis, the prevailing view was that the outcome of the election would be “somewhere between a narrow Biden win and a ‘blue wave.'” But now, Ellis says, “What had seemed reasonably certain no longer seemed certain at all.”
That sounds like 2016.
As of midnight at the end of Election Day, November 3, Slate (Loofbourow, 2020) said this:
As of this writing, we don’t know who the president will be. … If Biden had swept up Florida and Texas, say—unlikely, but indicative perhaps of a nationwide shift away from Trumpism—the election would be a wrap. We’d be done. That’s not what’s happening. … [W]e already know one thing: This isn’t a landslide, it’s a dogfight, and it’s going to be ugly. … Democrats will be extremely lucky to win the presidency. … It looked like Donald Trump was going to finally, definitively, be shown the door. … There would be a chance to grow meaningful change …. I no longer think that’s the message of this election. Joe Biden still may win the presidency, sure. But a bigger proportion of the country than we thought is fine with things as they are.
It’s the end of Election Week, as some are calling it, and the dust seems to be settling. My prediction was wrong: Trump lost. He has mounted lawsuits and recall efforts in multiple states, but the word (which I have not investigated) is that these efforts won’t and probably couldn’t add up to a victory.
As suggested in another post, I join much of America in a sense of relief. Here’s hoping Biden is a good president.