As recently opined here at The Inquisitr , Donald Trump could conceivably face a serious hurdle if even a slightly more competitive Democrat than Hillary Clinton opposes him in 2020.
The president barely eked out a victory in Michigan and wasn’t notably competitive in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016. Trump won by as little as 0.3 percent in Michigan, just at 1 percent in Wisconsin, and the highest of his 2016 major-upset-states during the election occurred with a Trump lead of only 1.2 percent in Pennsylvania. Regardless of spread, a win is of course still a win. But just as objective, numbers don’t lie.
A loss of these three swing-states would have cost Trump the 2016 election and resulted in a 278-260 win for Democrats, assuming all other states remained the same.
Vox just referenced a recent poll from Morning Consult in describing President Trump’s rapidly-wavering support in the aforementioned states, declaring prospective trouble for Trump’s 2020 re-election aspirations even if all other states hold steady in terms of Trump support. Vox described Trump’s approval in the Midwest as “deflating” and discussed the president’s popularity as it appears to be wavering significantly.
“President Donald Trump is substantially less popular a year and a half into his presidency than when he initially took office. His popularity in the Midwest has completely deflated. And more people disapprove of him than approve in almost every single swing state that proved crucial to his 2016 victory.”
Morning Consult is awarded a “B-” (B minus) rating by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight , which considers a number of different factors in determining reliability in pollsters with their methodology explained on the aforementioned website. Morning Consult in terms of polling is considered to have a 0.6 point Democrat-leaning bias, meaning their polling methods tend to slightly favor liberal candidates over conservative ones, but significantly less so than other pollsters like Remington Research Group, which has an estimated mean reverted liberal bias of 1.1 points. For comparison, pollster Rammusen is estimated to have a 1.5 point bias in the opposite direction, favoring conservative candidates. They receive a C+ rating from FiveThirtyEight.
On the other hand, Trump support shows to be holding steady in the always-consequential swing-state of Florida and in the American Southeast in general. Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and South Carolina all show varying degrees of overall approval for the president.
It should also be noted that support for Donald Trump’s job approximately a year and a half into his presidency has significantly weakened, even in the south, since he took office in January 2017. Virtually every one of the previously mentioned Southeastern states has polled weaker in terms of favorability since Trump’s inauguration. Much of this has been attributed to Trump’s track record of being a relatively party-line conservative throughout his presidency, even caving to political pressure on issues of immigration. During Trump’s presidential campaign, he generally projected himself as an outsider and unconventional politician.
In 2016, the vast majority of pollsters reported Hillary Clinton would be the likely winner of the General Election. While this didn’t come to pass and caused many pollsters to be questioned in terms of reliability, it’s important to note that most pollsters were only able to gauge a prediction based on the popular vote. Hillary Clinton did definitively win the popular vote in 2016, as predicted. Most pollsters also reported a margin of error at around 3 percent, which, when factored in, also paints a picture of decidedly more accurate polling.
Donald Trump has claimed in the past that he would have won the popular vote, definitively, if it not for election-meddling illegal voters. As yet, no serious evidence of illegal voters in such dramatic numbers has ever been presented. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by approximately 3 million votes, which is exponentially higher than the small number of isolated cases of voter fraud confirmed in 2016
I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
Trump’s assertions that voter fraud was the primary reason behind Hillary’s 3-million-voter edge in the technically-inconsequential popular vote are deemed false statements by PolitiFact .
Furthermore, The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina reported that the State Board of Elections reported that then-new voter ID laws in the state thwarted approximately one fraudulent vote out of 4.8 million during the 2016 Presidential Election.
