Democratic pollsters are beginning to wake up to the probability that the 2020 Trumpslide is coming:
To many political observers over the past year, the prospect of President Donald Trump’s reelection looked doubtful at best. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon reportedly gave Trump a 30 percent chance of finishing his term. Mike Murphy, the longtime GOP consultant and NeverTrumper, said that Trump will only be president “until early 2019.” And JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, like many others, bet more modestly: that Trump would be the first one-term president since George H. W. Bush.
These predictions were understandable. In 2017, it seemed, every day brought another Trump scandal, a bombshell in the Russia story, a brawl in the White House, or a diplomatic crisis, which explains why Trump’s approval rating last year was a historic low for a president’s first year in office. By year’s end, Democrats were anticipating a sweeping victory in this year’s midterm elections, with the opportunity to take back the House and perhaps even the Senate, and an enormous field of candidates was unofficially lining up for the party’s 2020 primary.
But recent data should trouble them. Internal polling by the Democratic group Priorities USA showed the president’s approval rating had climbed to 44 percent in early February, which “mirrors Trump’s improving position in public polls.” Gallup finds a narrow majority of Americans support his handling of the economy, and the new Republican tax law is getting more popular.
“I think people just kind of assume he’s a goner,” FiveThirtyEight statistician Nate Silver told me recently, “but look, he’s now more in a range where presidents have recovered to win reelection. His approval rating is up to 41 or 42 percent in our tracking. That verges on being a normal number that resembles what happened to Reagan or Clinton or Obama in their second years.” (Silver noted over the weekend that Trump dipped to 39 percent in their tracking.) As Jim Messina, who managed President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, warned earlier this month, “Donald Trump can absolutely be reelected.”
The God-Emperor isn’t merely going to win, he’s going to absolutely trounce the Democratic candidate so badly that I expect the top potential challengers to decided to steer clear before the primaries start and leave this one to the elderly whites to lose. An independent challenge from some Never-Trump no-hoper is probable, as well as a white female sacrificial lamb from the Democrats. Neither one will likely provide much of a speed bump to the Trump Re-election Train.
Trump isn’t just a good president. He is very likely going to be a great president, if he has the courage to ignore the press and ignore his talentless, ignorant advisors who keep trying to sabotage and control him. Build the Wall, Drain the Swamp, and Break the Pedo State. Nothing else really matters.