Trump: the Second Term

[Conchis]

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to observers of American politics that the current incumbent is almost certain to be re—elected next year.

That is, of course, if he chooses to run.

In three years, the Democrats and other opposition forces have failed to find a way of derailing with Trump, who continues to write the narrative, control events and set the agenda. American politics is ‘about’ Trump and his opponents seem to define themselves in reaction to him rather than trying to carve out identities of their own.

The current Democratic candidates look like a combination of those who are past their sell by date (Biden) and others with an eye on the next but one election (the one who calls himself ‘Mayor Pete’ may shrewdly figure that it will take a good eight years before people can pronounce his surname correctly).

Like him or not, Trump has been a game-changing President and he will influence future Presidents, even those who don’t share his politics. The POTUS will now be EXPECTED to be active on twitter and to get into spats with his opponents. A President who doesn’t will look DULL.

The BBC’s current ‘speculative’ drama series Years And Years posits a future in which Pence succeeds Trump in 2024, but DJT continues to direct affairs as a back-seat driver. A very credible scenario, even given Trump’s age.....

[pastoralguy]

What I worry about is a Trump Dynasty with Ivanka being a credible candidate followed, possibly, by Baron when he's old enough.

[Conchis]

What I worry about is a Trump Dynasty with Ivanka being a credible candidate followed, possibly, by Baron when he's old enough.

That kid has a really nasty vibe about him.

[BBMmk2]

That kid has a really nasty vibe about him.

How so? We don’t see this over here.

[Demetrius]

It’s becoming increasingly obvious to observers of American politics that the current incumbent is almost certain to be re—elected next year.

Nonsense. Both Biden and Sanders outpoll Trump. Doesn't mean that Trump can't win, but he is certainly not "almost certain" to win.
Neither Biden nor Sanders have any kind of lock on the Democratic Nomination, there is no way to tell what will happen then, 6 Months before the primaries being the "front runner" means next to nothing. JEB Bush was once a front runner to receive a nomination. As was Herman Cain.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-6250.html

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html

The Democrats come from a massive victory in the midterms. They took the house with 53,4 % to 44,8 %. In American Politics, which are usually always tight, a 9 % lead is massive. Again, doesn't mean that the Democrats run away with it in 2020, the Republicans blew a similar result after 2010 when Obama got reelected in 2012. Still, not something to dismiss out of hand.

Trump has become the face of many quite unpopular policies, making him a rallying cry for the opposition as well as for his supporters. Child separation policies, for one, spending cuts to infrastructure. His first budget basically proposed shutting down most rural airports in the US, which may not helped him that much with rural voters, and he needs to turn them out in numbers, even a slight dip in turnout will hurt him massively in Michigan, Pennsylvania etc.

In the Midterms, the percentage of voters with Latino background that went to the election almost doubled. If that leads to a noticeable increase in latino/hispanic turnout in 2020, he can forget about Nevada, which he already lost last time around, and will be hard put to win Arizona, which elected a bisexual Democrat woman to the Senate last year. That is a state that has been deeply red for decades. This constituency did not like him all that much before his presidency. Even less now. Democrats need a strong turnout of African-American voters, since they reliably vote for Democrats to the tune of 90 %.

Trumps cosying up to white supremacists, which has happened mostly after the 2016 election, is going to help the Democratic efforts to turnout more voters of this demographic group. Given recent results, that will make winning Pennsylvannia or Michigan tougher for Trump. He might even have to spend time in Georgia, and more likely North Carolina. It will also help putting Virginia out of his reach early on.

As for the Democratic field, I would prefer the candidate to be neither Biden nor Sanders. Sanders is - with good reason - not too popular among Democrats (not their voters, Democrats themselves). Biden is a gaffer. This will not get better as an 80-year-old.
Do not count out their competition. If Sanders crashes, Elisabeth Warren will be the natural candidate of the left wing, and, if she is the last woman to remain in the race, can expect significant support by groups like Emily's List, which is the single biggest lobby group, easily outraising even the NRA election after election (2016 Emily's List 90 Million $, NRA 50 Million $). And Kamela Harris is there too. Obama was not better known then her in 2007. He had fewer competition though, which makes it tougher on her. But out of the 24 declared candidates, not all of them are major Pete.

Even if Trump wins again, don't bet on Pence even getting the presidency or even the nomination in 2024. Vice president is not a good stepping stone to a presidency anymore, as long as the president in question survives. Since 1900, only Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and the elder Bush have won elections as a siting vice president. And Pence has none of the charisma and antics you say will be expected from a president in future.

[LMcD]

I was thinking of starting a petition asking the United Nations to vote on a resolution to rename the USA Trumpton. I'm afraid that's the extent of my interest in the subject, perhaps because I'm arrogant enough to believe that there are many more important things to devote my time to, such as - oh, I don't know - which is the best recording of K491, or whether to convert my study into a downstairs bedroom when I can no longer manage the stairs (as against moving or installing a stairlift).

[Conchis]

Nonsense. Both Biden and Sanders outpoll Trump. Doesn't mean that Trump can't win, but he is certainly not "almost certain" to win.
Neither Biden nor Sanders have any kind of lock on the Democratic Nomination, there is no way to tell what will happen then, 6 Months before the primaries being the "front runner" means next to nothing. JEB Bush was once a front runner to receive a nomination. As was Herman Cain.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-6250.html

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html

The Democrats come from a massive victory in the midterms. They took the house with 53,4 % to 44,8 %. In American Politics, which are usually always tight, a 9 % lead is massive. Again, doesn't mean that the Democrats run away with it in 2020, the Republicans blew a similar result after 2010 when Obama got reelected in 2012. Still, not something to dismiss out of hand.

Trump has become the face of many quite unpopular policies, making him a rallying cry for the opposition as well as for his supporters. Child separation policies, for one, spending cuts to infrastructure. His first budget basically proposed shutting down most rural airports in the US, which may not helped him that much with rural voters, and he needs to turn them out in numbers, even a slight dip in turnout will hurt him massively in Michigan, Pennsylvania etc.

In the Midterms, the percentage of voters with Latino background that went to the election almost doubled. If that leads to a noticeable increase in latino/hispanic turnout in 2020, he can forget about Nevada, which he already lost last time around, and will be hard put to win Arizona, which elected a bisexual Democrat woman to the Senate last year. That is a state that has been deeply red for decades. This constituency did not like him all that much before his presidency. Even less now. Democrats need a strong turnout of African-American voters, since they reliably vote for Democrats to the tune of 90 %.

Trumps cosying up to white supremacists, which has happened mostly after the 2016 election, is going to help the Democratic efforts to turnout more voters of this demographic group. Given recent results, that will make winning Pennsylvannia or Michigan tougher for Trump. He might even have to spend time in Georgia, and more likely North Carolina. It will also help putting Virginia out of his reach early on.

As for the Democratic field, I would prefer the candidate to be neither Biden nor Sanders. Sanders is - with good reason - not too popular among Democrats (not their voters, Democrats themselves). Biden is a gaffer. This will not get better as an 80-year-old.
Do not count out their competition. If Sanders crashes, Elisabeth Warren will be the natural candidate of the left wing, and, if she is the last woman to remain in the race, can expect significant support by groups like Emily's List, which is the single biggest lobby group, easily outraising even the NRA election after election (2016 Emily's List 90 Million $, NRA 50 Million $). And Kamela Harris is there too. Obama was not better known then her in 2007. He had fewer competition though, which makes it tougher on her. But out of the 24 declared candidates, not all of them are major Pete.

Even if Trump wins again, don't bet on Pence even getting the presidency or even the nomination in 2024. Vice president is not a good stepping stone to a presidency anymore, as long as the president in question survives. Since 1900, only Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and the elder Bush have won elections as a siting vice president. And Pence has none of the charisma and antics you say will be expected from a president in future.

Sanders identifies himself as a socialist. Isn’t it a fact that the thing that most Americans fear (even more than death or war) is Socialism?

A Trump-Sanders contest would be even more polarising than the Trump-Clinton one and would (almost certainly) lead to the same result.

Disaster in the mid-terms is usually a positive sign that a president will be re-elected.

The U.S. economy is currently strong and will probably be so in eighteen months’ time. People will vote, as they usually do, with their pockets.

The character of the incumbent matters little: people had been calling Nixon a crook for years before he won (small) in 1968 and then again (big) in 1972. On the latter occasion, the US economy was in recession.

Trump may serve a full-term up to 2024, by which time he may have transformed America and the western world.

[Demetrius]

Roosevelt got in on a socialist ticket. Even Nixon was "a bit of a pinko", to quote Stephen Colbert (in his Report days). Socialism is ticking up in polls, even though it is still not what you might consider popular. And an election does not turn on a single issue. American elections always have an element of choosing the lesser evil, since in the end, it comes down to two candidates, and there will always be a part of the electorate that does not agree wholeheartedly with either of them.

The old Reagan "moral majority", those nice evangelical believers in family values, turned out for Trump in the last election. Not all of them, but enough to combine with Trumps original voter base and give him a voting coalition that just managed to win the election against probably the most unpopular Democratic candidate since at least Mondale.

Sanders polls worse than Biden, but he is still ahead against Trump. When Obama ran in 2008, people said America would never elect a black president. When Hilary ran, they said they would never elect a woman (they didn't - yet - but after that result it would be absurd to rule it out for the future). American politics is more complicated than such simple rules of thumb.

A Trump-Sanders contest would be even more polarising than the Trump-Clinton one and would (almost certainly) lead to the same result.

More polarizing ... possibly. Same result? Dubiously. The whole mechanics of a Sanders-Trump race are different. Sanders weakness in the Democratic voter base during the 2016 primaries has been African American and Hispanic voters, which regularly voted for Hillary with 60 to 80 %. If he does not address that weakness and it supresses turnout even slightly, he has a massive headache. He could then loose states that Hilary won - Virginia, Nevada. On the other hand, he could make a significant dent in Trumps white male vote, and push up turnout of students at the ballot boxes. He would certainly win Wisconsin, and probably have a really good shot at Ohio. Again, American politics are a complicated mess, not something to be judged lightly on the basis of two or three general suppositions.

Disaster in the mid-terms is usually a positive sign that a president will be re-elected.

The Party in charge held onto the presidency after bad midterms in 2012, 1996. They lost the presidency in 1968, 1976, 2008 and 2016. Good democratic midterms are not, by themselves, a guarantee that Trump looses in 2020. But to say that Trumps party got pummeled, so he will definitely win, is absurd.

Historically, btw, midterm voters are on average quite a bit older and somewhat whiter than voters in presidential election years. Since the Democratic voter coalition has grown more and more to rely on young and none-white voters, they have struggled in midterms for the last 3 decades. The only time they did really well (2006), Obama was flushed in by a wave election. In 2006, Democrats won by a margin of 8 %. 2018 they had a margin of 8,6 %.

The U.S. economy is currently strong and will probably be so in eighteen months’ time. People will vote, as they usually do, with their pockets.

The US economy is certainly not doing too badly. There are worries of a down-turn, but there are always worries about a down-turn, so who knows. Thing is: the people did not vote with their pockets in 2012, when they reelected Obama. The GDP was growing in the first half of the year, but slowed down massively during election season, unemployment rates were still sky high, prolonged fights over the fiscal cliff meant quite a few taxation scares, and the debt rate was still shockingly high from the 2008 crash. The voters still went with Obama.

The economy is certainly an important factor in an election, but other factors might supersede it. Now, the only question is whether this will be an election about the economy because Trump stays on that message and doesn't get involved into any other topic, like reopening a discussion on caging children by himself, after the topic had died down. I don't rate the chance of that happening too highly. Do you?

The character of the incumbent matters little: people had been calling Nixon a crook for years before he won (small) in 1968 and then again (big) in 1972. On the latter occasion, the US economy was in recession.

Ok. On that I have to call bullshit. Quite aside of disproving your earlier theory of people voting with their pockets, take a look at Tricky Dicks approval Ratings:

https://historyinpieces.com/research/nixon-approval-ratings

During his first term, his approval rating was around 60 percent; it dipped a bit in 1971, but got back to 60 in 1972. When Watergate came out, his numbers plummeted down to 24 %, because people lost their trust in him, meaning that they had trust in him before. They regarded him as a clever bastard before, and as a ****ing bastard afterwards.

Trumps numbers due to the emergence of partisan polling jump about a bit (Morning Consult or Quinnipac on one side, Rasmussen on the other), but the averages are pretty clearcut:

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

Even the Rasmussen polls see him only scraping at 49 or 50 % approval and similar disapproval (there is just about nobody left who has no opinion on the guy). To compare the view of the public of Nixon 1972 to Trump 2020 is absurd.

[Boilk]

Sanders identifies himself as a socialist. Isn’t it a fact that the thing that most Americans fear (even more than death or war) is Socialism?

A Trump-Sanders contest would be even more polarising than the Trump-Clinton one and would (almost certainly) lead to the same result.

Had it been Trump-Sanders in 2016, Sanders would probably have won - he would have garnered most of those blue collar votes that couldn't go to Hillary, who was perceived as the Establishment candidate - and there were a lot of angry, disenfranchised American blue collar voters.

Trump won for two main reasons: (a) the establishment's "crooked Hillary" with her XXX-sized skeleton cupboard became a national hate figure; (b) Trump's negative publicity machine (paradoxically the Democrat-siding MSNBC, CNN, et. al.) didn't realise that bad publicity for Trump was better than no publicity - they gave Trump's every Tweet, rally and speech almost a 24-hour rolling media coverage that would otherwise have cost his campaign billions of dollars - he got it for free from the Hillary-supporting mainstream media!!

In the aftermath of the shock result, we've thus had a 2-year Russiagate hoax to act as a smokescreen for (a) Democrats' / Hillary's utter humiliation and (b) America having to hold a mirror up to itself to realise what a farce their political system has become when a politically inexperienced TV game-show host with alleged misogynistic tendencies gets to occupy the Oval Office. Why would America's mainstream media hold their hands up and blame it all on their own malfeasance, when they can pull the wool over the eyes of their audience by pointing the finger at the Kremlin?

[richardfinegold]

It is really something when as an American, I see more perceptive commentary about our Politics from a UK based site than I get back home, particularly from Boik, Demetrius and Conchis. Our own Media are to engulfed in their partisan posturing to say anything useful.
It is appalling that the Democrats are so divided. I gave a lecture recently at a Hospital and needing an icebreaker I asked the audience “If anyone here is not running for President as a Democrat, please raise your hand”. I fear that Trump will win out again. For the Democrats this is about a changing of the Guard; establishment figures like Biden will be winnowed out by younger generations such as Mayor Pete

[Demetrius]

For the Democrats this is about a changing of the Guard; establishment figures like Biden will be winnowed out by younger generations such as Mayor Pete

That could indeed be the case. A lot of people are uneasy about Biden and Sanders because of their age; it is just the question whether someone can establish her-/himself as a clear alternative to them before either get too many delegates.

Scenario 1:

Sanders does well in Caucuses (A good demonstration for that is Washington State, which for some weird reason has a caucus, which decides the delegates, and a nonbinding primary for the heck of it; Sanders took the caucus with 72,7 % of the delegate votes allocated by some 230000 voters; in the primary, Hillary got 420000 votes to Sanders 380000). His voter base is highly motivated and tends to turn up, so the less voters overall, the better for him. And he did well in New Hampshire, which is basically his next door neighbor. He could win the first 3 contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. If he does, the news coverage will talk him up as the certain winner, not because they are necessarily partisan, but because they are short-sighted. The important thing in that scenario is how the field will weed itself out. There will be quite a few candidates who, when they see that they have no chance, are going to cash in their somewhat heightened status as a candidate by dropping out and supporting someone else in exchange for future goodies - appointment to the cabinet, support for a senate or a governor race etc. The fewer candidates are still around in South Carolina, the worse for the front runners, especially if Biden has underperformed and Sanders is in the lead. Defeat him in South Carolina, where he is weak (Hillary won there with 70+ %, after only getting a defacto draw in Nevada and Iowa and losing New Hampshire). Then use that momentum to establish yourself as the clear alternative to Sanders during Super Tuesday. This is doable for someone who can get some enthusiasm going among African-American and Hispanic voters. And if you are from Texas or California, that's a nice bonus. If Kamela Harris, Beto O'Rourke or possibly Cory Booker are still there, they can do it. Especially if others that share their areas of strength (like Julian Castro) drop out.

Scenario 2

Sanders underperforms early, because he no longer is the consensus anti-establishment "just not Hillary" candidate, and Elizabeth Warren and/or Major Pete cut into his voter share. Biden also gets much less of the vote then suggested by current polls once other candidates establish themselves, it stays an open field much longer, Booker wins South Carolina and Virgina, Harris California, O'Rourke Texas, Messam Florida, Warren and Sanders split New England, Klobuchar takes some of Minnesota/Michigan/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania/Ohio and Gillibrand or Bill de Blasio take New York. Enter an insane brokered Convention with a multitute of candidates.

or, of course Scenario 3) Biden and Sanders start strong, everyone else drops out before Super Tuesday, and we get a repeat of 2016 with Sanders taking his usual states and Biden taking Clintons or 3b) Sanders overcomes his weakness in the southern states or Biden messes up his campaign after everyone else has dropped out handing Sanders the nomination.

or Scenario 4, 5, 6, .... with so many candidates in the ring, who knows. I don't see major Pete taking the whole thing, though.

[greenilex]

And Bloomberg?

[DracoM]

I have American friends who are seriously distraught and distressed by the prospect of a Trump second term, so much so that one of them is seriously working on a way to move whole family to Canada.

[richardfinegold]

I have American friends who are seriously distraught and distressed by the prospect of a Trump second term, so much so that one of them is seriously working on a way to move whole family to Canada.

There were many celebrities that swore they were going to move to Canada after the 2016 election. I read an article about a year ago that reviewed it and of about 15 people cited only one actually did.
Bloomberg and Obama’s former A.G. Deval Patrick making a late entry only shows how inept the Democrats are. If they had been able to field a reasonable, middle of the road candidate, Trump would be toast. I am personally working for Elizabeth Warren, but I am appalled at how badly she has handled the realities of informing the Country how she would finance her Revolution, and how poorly she fared with the backlash.
Between she and Sanders I do think this country has taken a turn towards socialism, but it will probably be one or two elections before a younger candidate can succeed with their agenda. Joe Biden hasn’t a lot of support beyond the Black Community, and the revelations about Ukraine aren’t helping (he may not have broken any laws, but it smacks of cronyism, and the longer the Impeachment Process drags on, the more people start to question him). Bloomberg? He was a Republican Mayor of New York, and most Americans outside of NYC don’t know who he is. It is all to depressing

[MrGongGong]

I have American friends who are seriously distraught and distressed by the prospect of a Trump second term, so much so that one of them is seriously working on a way to move whole family to Canada.

That's what I love about the UK
we would never get a misogynist racist to be our prime minister