By Douglas Perry
The Oregonian
President Donald Trump has never been able to reach a 50% job-approval rating in mainstream opinion surveys, a historically poor polling performance for a commander-in-chief.
Doesn’t matter. He’s still on his way to re-election, say seasoned political data analysts.
Yale professor Ray Fair’s long-established political model relies on the economy — specifically the gross domestic product and inflation — to predict election outcomes. Former Obama Administration official Steven Rattner pointed out this week that, according Fair’s model, “Mr. Trump’s vote share would ordinarily be as high as 56.1%. But that’s before factoring in his personality.” Even with Trump’s temperament pulling down his total, he’ll still win, the Yale Model concludes. His vote should end up at about 54%. His Democratic opponent is expected to get only 45.4%.
American University professor Allan Lichtman, one of the few political prognosticators in 2016 who predicted Trump would win, has come to the same conclusion. He too believes the president will win again next year. His method involves examining 13 determinants ranging from whether there’s a serious third-party candidate to the health of the economy.
“Trump wins again in 2020 unless six of 13 key factors turn against him,” Lichtman told CNN this week. “I have no final verdict yet because much could change during the next year. Currently, the President is down only three keys: Republican losses in the [2018] midterm elections, the lack of a foreign policy success, and the president’s limited appeal to voters.”
Lichtman, who has correctly predicted every presidential election for more than three decades, believes impeachment would be another “key” counting against Trump, even though polls indicate the American people don’t want the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach the president.
Then there’s Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. He has run 12 models that look at “economic trends at the state level” to predict the upcoming presidential election. Trump triumphs in all of them.
“If the election were held today,” Zandi said recently, “Trump would win according to the models — and pretty handily. In three or four of them it would be pretty close. He’s got low gas prices, low unemployment and a lot of other political variables at his back. The only exception is his popularity, which matters a lot. If that falls off a cliff it would make a big difference.”
Another modeler, Trend Macrolytics’ Donald Luskin, also has concluded that President Trump will romp to victory next year.
The hyper-partisan political environment in the U.S. means that most votes are essentially locked in for one candidate or the other regardless of outside factors.
Independents, along with the small number of disaffected Republicans and Democrats, likely will direct the 2020 election result. Incumbency — that is, simply being a sitting president — historically has proven a powerful advantage, and the state of the economy often drives voters who are not unswerving partisans.
