A number of prominent political commentators, not all from the Right, are ignoring recent polls showing President Donald Trump losing — if the election were held today — to any number of socialist Democrats currently vying for their party’s nomination. Some of them hail from outside the United States, giving them both a perspective not available from the national mainstream media and protection from that same media for going off-script in their predictions that Trump will win reelection, perhaps decisively, in 2020.
Piers Morgan, the liberal British news host who was fired from CNN in 2014 over his show’s low ratings, wrote that “by any normal yardstick, the President is headed for a defeat in the 2020 election.” But these are hardly normal times, as Morgan was quick to point out:
Everyone seems to forget that Trump won with just 46.1 percent of the national [popular] vote in 2016.… the day before the election just 37.5 % of American voters … had a “favorable” opinion of Trump….
The latest Real Clear Politics (RCP) poll average shows Trump’s favorability opinion, at 43.8 %, is over six percentage points higher than when he won last time….
So, either the polls were wrong, or a lot of people voted for Trump despite not liking him.
Morgan counted the cards in Trump’s hand, and found most of them to be face cards:
• His campaign has already raised nearly $100 million, including the $24 million that came in the day after his reelection announcement this week in Orlando;
• In 2016 Trump funded his campaign largely with his own money. Now the president has the support from major Republican donors;
• He is delivering on his campaign promises, something unheard of in politics;
• He’s already named two conservatives to the Supreme Court, and is ready with a pre-approved list from the Federalist Society in the event another opportunity presents itself; and
• He’s taken tough positions on China, Iran and immigration.
On the other hand, according to Morgan, “the Democrats seem [to be] all over the place, unsure whether to go for the age and experience of Joe Biden, or the youth and inexperience of a Mayor Pete, and even more unsure whether to pivot to the center or to the left. They’ve stuck their heads like ostriches in the sand and appear terrified to stick them out again lest the big bad beast of Trump shoots them down again.”
The Democrats also sport the same arrogance that turned off voters in 2016: “They’re brimming with the same entitled, arrogant ‘We’ll beat Trump because he’s a moron’ nonsense that Hillary spewed throughout the last campaign, to catastrophic self-harm.”
Michael Massing, an American writer with credits at the New York Times, the New Yorker magazine, Politico, and The Atlantic, asked rhetorically, “How can evangelicals support Donald Trump?” and then answered: “Because they believe that God is … using the less-than-perfect Trump to achieve Christian aims.” And the elitist mentality among liberals opposing Trump and his supporters galvanizes them: “Disdain for Christians common among the credentialed class can only add to the sense of alienation and marginalization among evangelicals … who feel themselves under siege.… Many conservative Christians see the national news media as unrelievedly hostile to them.” He added, “If liberals continue to scoff, they risk reinforcing the rage of evangelicals — and their support for Trump.”
Victor Davis Hanson, a political commentator and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, noted that back in 2016 Donald Trump was not only a political novice facing a heavily favored and entrenched Hillary Clinton, he had no track record to run on. Now he does, and many formerly skeptical independent voters will, in November 2020, “likely win enough swing states to repeat his 2016 Electoral College victory.”
There’s another advantage favoring a Trump victory. Many voters voted for him simply because he wasn’t Hillary. Today, the fight coming into focus is capitalism vs. socialism. Said Hanson, Trump “will likely run on the premise that he is the only one standing between [those] voters and socialism.” He added:
The Green New Deal, a wealth tax, a top marginal income tax rate of 70 percent, the abolition of ICE, the abolition of the Electoral College, reparations, legal infanticide as abortion, the cancellation of student debt, free college tuition, Medicare for all and the banning of private insurance plans are not winning, 51 percent issues.
If the Democratic nominee embraces most of these fringe advocacies — or is forced by the hard left to run on some of them — he or she will lose.
There’s another factor working in Trump’s favor: If Democrats in Congress persist in continuing their witch hunt despite the Mueller investigation turning up with nothing on which to pin the president, then Trump will increasingly “appear [to be] a victim of an unprecedented and extraconstitutional assault.”
Roger Kimball, a social commentator writing in the British Spectator, counts numerous victories and successes that Trump is enjoying that the Democrats will be unable to overcome: the stock market, the country’s economic growth, low unemployment, lower taxes, conservative judicial appointments, the fight against illegal immigration, and his unabashed willingness to stand up to China, North Korea, and Iran. Kimball concluded that “if the next two years are anything like the last [two], Donald Trump will win in a landslide.”
If these experienced political seers are correct, President Donald Trump will continue to serve the country as president through 2024.
Photo: AP Images
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
Related articles:
Trump’s New Plan Puts States Back in Charge of Energy Regulation
Jesus’ Name Lifted Up at Trump’s Reelection Rally; Media All But Silent
