President Trump’s Narrow Path to Reelection
The Trump presidency has reinforced rather than contradicted many of the main trends in modern politics. This includes the increasing polarization of the American electorate and the reliance of political professionals on negative partisanship, the emphasis on motivating voters through dislike of their opponents rather than a preference for their own candidate, or his or her policies.
What this means is that voters more than ever think of their parties as sports teams and root and vote accordingly. Voters who disliked both Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016 broke decisively in Trump’s direction (at present, such voters are leaning sharply towards Biden). In short, there are ever fewer persuadable voters, and politics is more than ever a matter of getting one’s own team out to the polls. A handful of actual independents remain; getting their votes in swing states is critical.
Polarization guarantees that presidential elections likely will be close, at least in the popular vote, regardless of the underlying economic or political circumstances. The Electoral College skew in favor of rural voters means that Democrats, in their present coalition, have a big uphill climb; compared to the GOP, Democratic voters are more loosely organized, further apart ideologically, and assembling a winning coalition requires bringing aboard at least of sliver of more moderate and even conservative voters in certain states.
Incumbent U.S. presidents usually win a second term. On the two most recent occasions when they have not (1980 and 1992), a strong third-party candidate was in the race. There won’t be a substantial third party candidate in 2020, which tends to benefit the incumbent.
However, in terms of his job approval ratings and the current state of the economy, Trump fits the mold of a one-term president. Even in a best-case scenario Trump would have been vulnerable on paper, as his overall approval rating has never topped 50 percent. In a good economy, he still would have been an odds-on favorite to win. The impact of the coronavirus and the shelter-in-place shutdowns on the economy have shifted the narrative, however. Trump’s predictably tone-deaf and autocratic response to the massive protests against police brutality and systemic racism has also done him few favors, at least in the short run.
What was shaping up originally as a race that resembled the 2004 George W. Bush-John Kerry election, with some similar factors in play--an overheated but decent economy, a Republican incumbent seeking a second term, and popular discontent over Iraq, now leans in Biden’s direction. Biden holds a consistent national lead and is at or near the pivotal 50 percent threshold in most polls, and he has a smaller but significant lead in swing states.
As conventional a Republican presidency as Trump’s has been in many respects, except for his imposition of tariffs, the President’s approach to reelection has been unorthodox. Few politicians who eked out a victory by 80,000 votes or so and lost the popular vote would have doubled down on a strategy of base consolidation rather than pivoting toward the center.
Had his temperament allowed him to pivot, Trump probably would have had at least a 65 percent approval rating before the onset of the coronavirus, even in a highly polarized electorate. Instead, unlike any other modern President, Trump has remained in campaign mode throughout his term in office, cultivating a base united by ethnocultural unity and shared religious beliefs.
Save briefly after the government shutdown, after the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act (downwards), and at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic (upwards), his approval numbers have been virtually impervious to events, even seemingly pivotal events, usually around 42 percent on average. Trump is different from a President in crisis whose ratings are in freefall. His strategy is more like a boxer using a rope-a-dope approach. The negatives are all built in, but by putting himself on the ropes his favorable ratings probably won’t fall much lower either. The idea is to stay within striking distance and to win with a late boost of support combined with strategies for diminishing Democratic turnout, such as restricting early voting, shutting down polling sites, demanding stricter forms of voter ID, and legally purging the rolls of infrequent voters.
Were Trump able even to pretend to being a unifying candidate, his reelection chances would rise. But he still draws upon many advantages. His campaign has a large bankroll, roughly twice that of Joe Biden in terms of cash-on-hand (184 million versus 98 million at the end of April). He dominates the airwaves, always exploiting the P.T. Barnum principle that no publicity is bad publicity, and comfortably works any crisis into his familiar frame of division, recrimination, and assignment of blame. He lowers expectations and relentlessly changes the subject from day to day and hour to hour (in his former adviser Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase, “flooding the zone with s-t”).
While traditionally voters blame incumbents for bad times, chaos is Trump’s natural environment. And since the modern GOP under Trump has turned into a permanent insurgency, what many voters see as government competence in action—such as public health encouragement of contact tracing and the wearing of masks to combat the spread of the coronavirus—is resented and resisted by many Republican voters.
Trump has on his side, in effect, a massive state propaganda apparatus in Fox News, Sinclair-owned television stations, plus the even more extreme niche broadcasters such as One America News Network (OANN), and much of talk radio. He is also backed by a well-honed and superior digital operation.
Trump taps into a massive wave of cultural resentment, founded on a wave of white identity politics and religious nationalism which most liberals and Democrats still underestimate—many religious voters are less concerned with piety or even the issues of the “culture wars,” apart from abortion, than in claiming and using the power of the state to their advantage.
He boasts a high level of support from voters who regularly attend church, a bloc which has expanded and consolidated during his Presidency. This bloc is gradually substituting for his erosion of support among white college-educated men and women.
While Trump’s aggregate approval numbers have barely budged, something is happening, at least at the margin. The GOP (or at least Trump’s GOP) is losing a modest number of college-educated white men and women, especially suburban women, but Trump is consolidating and enlarging his already substantial base of voters who attend church regularly and those for whom white identity is pivotal. This bloc has expanded during his presidency and is gradually substituting for his erosion of support among those with college degrees.
As an example, the number of white Protestants who believe literally that President Trump is anointed by God rose from just under 30 percent in 2019 among regular churchgoers to almost 50 percent in 2020. The latter figure includes all of those who go to church often, not only evangelicals or mainline Protestants. Many of these voters hate secular liberalism passionately. They feel that the 2020 election, and the Trump presidency, represents their last chance to preserve, as they see it, a United States based on Christian principles grounded in custom and law, with an emphasis on gender hierarchy and white racial preeminence.
GOP voters may have a slightly smaller footprint than in 2016 but are driven if anything with even greater intensity this time around. (As one commentator puts it, fairly, “Elections are not won by passive majorities but by mobilized minorities.”) The good news for Democrats is that a considerable number of the Trump voters who are leaving are suburbanites concentrated in swing districts, largely women, who fueled the gains in the House in 2018. The bad news for Democrats is that many of these “converts” are anti-Trump but still conservative, relatively speaking, on policy issues. Trump is trying to redefine the pandemic and the protests along racial and identity lines— his main go-to move— for his base while persuading this breakaway group of suburbanites that Democratic leadership will mean social disorder and that progressive policies are too radical. While he has bungled his early efforts to portray himself as a defender of “law and order” in the wake of protests for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd murder, he will keep trying to revive this strategy.
If he takes 45 percent of the national vote or even slightly less, Trump has a chance, as in 2016, to eke out an Electoral College victory. With an effective campaign of voter suppression, the potential for Russian interference, a billion dollar misinformation campaign on social media, a growing economy, and a more sophisticated appeal to the fears of white voters (e.g. turning the call to “defund the police,” which Biden has rejected, into a claim that Democrats want to dismantle police protections altogether, he retains a path to winning.
It isn’t surprising that the Democratic race fell in Joe Biden’s direction, given Biden’s early frontrunner status, but the speed with which primary voters coalesced was breathtaking, given that Biden had been poor at raising money, had run a lackluster campaign, and did nothing especially memorable on the campaign trail. Like voters picking a stock, most Democrats made their decisions based on what they thought other Americans were unlikely to do (vote for a woman, or for a socialist) and which direction African-American voters would turn.
The 2020 election was always likely to be a referendum on Donald Trump under any circumstances. The upheavals of the first six months of 2020 have made Biden a better foil: polling gives a wide margin to Biden on issues such as competence and empathy (“cares about someone like me”) that are well-placed to deflect attacks from Trump and his surrogates. Such attacks, designed to whip up negative partisanship, included in a recent single week charges that Biden was involved, with Barack Obama, in the greatest political crime in modern history, that he had committed sexual assault, engaged in nepotism toward the business dealings of his son, was exhibiting signs of senility, and was possibly a pedophile.
A Biden presidency would fulfill the wish of many Americans not to have politics in their face, and the politics of division in particular, 24/7. That may be Biden’s single greatest attribute, electorally speaking.