Underestimate Trump’s Reelection Odds at Your Own Peril
Kyle Kondik, Managing Editor, Sabato's Crystal Ball
Trump’s reelection odds may be better than many realize
...The Abramowitz model will make its 2020 projection officially using 2020’s second quarter GDP growth and whatever Trump’s approval is at that time. Still, we can plug in current numbers to give a sense of what the model might project. Right now, Trump’s net approval rating is -16 points according to Gallup (39% approve/55% disapprove), and 2017’s fourth quarter GDP growth (the most recent quarter available) was 2.9%, according to the most recent revision from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Using those figures in Abramowitz’s model projects Trump with 51.6% of the national two-party vote. Even if Trump were to underperform the model again, like he did in 2016, it would still make the election a Toss-up, especially because Trump could win again without winning the national popular vote given the demographic patterns of his support.
So the United States could reelect an incumbent president with an average approval in low 40s? Yes. And, actually, that’s perhaps what we should even expect given the performance of similarly-situated incumbents across many different countries...
Incumbents get a boost in the Ipsos model, though, just like in Abramowitz’s model. Young and Clark suggest that as long as an incumbent is at 40% approval or better, that person is probably at least a little likelier to win than lose. So Trump, at 41.9% approval in the RealClearPolitics average, would be capable of winning reelection, if not outright favored, if that’s where his approval rating is in fall 2020...
We think the decent economy is helping Trump maintain a weak but passable approval rating despite all of the swirling controversies of his presidency. If the economy weakens, Trump may dip back into the 30s in approval and further complicate his reelection path.
But assuming Trump is on the ballot, and assuming his approval rating stays around the 40% mark, it would probably be wrong to assume he’s an underdog for reelection. That’s not to say he would be a sure winner, but he wouldn’t be a sure loser, either.
The biggest mistake analysts made in 2016 was believing that Trump was such a weak candidate that he would prove to be unelectable even though a close reading of historical results, both in the United States and elsewhere, suggested that any Republican would be a formidable contender for the White House in a year like 2016, when the Democrats were attempting the difficult task of winning the presidency a third consecutive time (and they had nominated a weak candidate to face Trump). That same history, a history that is built into models like the Ipsos and Abramowitz models, suggests an incumbent in Trump’s position will not be a pushover unless his approval and/or the economy significantly decline from their present levels.
