Another fluke Trump victory is unlikely, but possible
That the Republican minority, which has been living in a dream world pretty much ever since the Age of Trump began, is confident of this is not surprising. Delusions can be pretty strong. It's far more surprising that most of the voters believe it since individually they continue to express their intention to vote against him. In fact, as I've pointed out several times before, there has never been a single day since Mr. Trump first announced his candidacy that he has commanded the support of a majority of the electorate as measured by the consensus of the polls.
Except perhaps it isn't a delusion after all. I have written before that Mr. Trump has little of any chance of winning next year, and I still believe it. The American people cannot foolish and gullible enough, having voted to deny him even a first term, to give him a second after the mess he has made of the one he got against their wishes. My belief is rooted in the assumption that his vastly increased unpopularity would cost him enough of the states that he won in 2016 that there would be no question of the will of the American people being thwarted once again by an outdated constitutional relic like the Electoral College.
That relic has resulted in two of the last five presidential elections resulting in the election of the candidate most Americans voted against, although a strong case can be made that only the 2016 election was an actual thwarting of the popular will.* The polls indeed show Mr. Trump trailing in the "battleground states" he would need to carry to pull off another aberrant victory in the Electoral College despite what will likely be a second, and more decisive, defeat in the popular vote. But although he trails in those states, it seems that Mr. Trump is still competitive there.
Mr. Trump carried my own state, Iowa, with 51.15% of the vote in 2016. Nearly six percent went to independent and third-party candidates. The Libertarians will probably run a candidate in 2020, but it remains to be seen given the role Jill Stein's candidacy is thought to have played in tipping the last election to Mr. Trump whether the Green Party will do so. Certainly, unless the Democrats nominate someone like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, Never Trumpers such as myself will, for the most part, vote for the Democrat rather than support another independent candidate like Evan Mc Mullin. And given the harm to the state's farmers done by the president's ridiculous trade war with China, it's widely believed that the backbone of Mr. Trump's Iowa support last time out may have second thoughts in 2020.
Yet the Emerson Poll, which had Joe Biden leading Mr. Trump in Iowa by six points last March, now has the President leading the former Vice-President by two. A recent NY Times-Sienna poll puts Mr. Trump's current lead over Mr. Biden in Iowa at one point. All of the margins except the six-point Biden lead last Spring are well within the margin of error.
All of the available polls show Mr. Trump carrying Iowa against Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Current polls put Mr. Trump's Iowa lead over Warren at an average of 4.5% I don't see Bernie Sanders as viable anymore. But if the Democrats nominate Warren, I find it hard to see her beating even Trump either in Iowa or nationally.
My hunch is that Mr. Trump is benefiting from a partisan reaction to the impeachment investigation. People who voted for Trump last time, and Republicans generally, are circling the wagons. The very real prospect exists that they will freeze in place and stubbornly cling to a candidate they've never been able to make a case for logically based on emotion alone. Emotion has always been the main reason why people have supported Mr. Trump. And that their support is based on emotion rather than reason is what makes that support invulnerable to logical argument.
That's true of many on the left, as well. But here, it opens up a completely believable scenario in which farmers and others whose livelihood is dependent on an agricultural sector that has been savaged by the Chinese retaliatory tariffs will vote against their own economic interests because those interests conflict with a loyalty to the person directly responsible for their economic hardships, and which will only intensify as the attacks against him become stronger.
For the first time, I'm beginning to see another electoral vote majority for Mr. Trump combined with a more decisive defeat in the popular vote as a possibility that needs to be reckoned with. I still see it as unlikely. If it happens, or if Mr. Trump wins because the Democrats find ideology more important than winning or continue to delude themselves with the idea that their left-wing is in the American mainstream, the American people will not have shown themselves incapable of intelligent self-government. But the system will have failed so catastrophically in two consecutive elections that its ongoing viability will depend on the abolition of the Electoral College and the substitution of the direct popular vote as the way we choose our presidents. The reasons why the Founders came up with the Electoral College have long since passed into history; history demands that we cease to allow our nation's destiny to be placed in the hands of people elected by an undemocratic fluke of geography.
*The outcome of the popular vote in 2000 in some ways may have even been bigger fluke than the outcome of the electoral vote in 2016. History thus far has given inadequate attention to the fact that in 2000, the networks not only called Florida- and in effect, the election- for Al Gore before the peak voting period for the Republican areas of Florida and for the majority of the nation, but did so on the basis of a new and, as it turned out, disastrously defective way of handling data from exit polls . Moreover, they continued to stand by the call for hours after the problem became apparent.
The question is not whether the Republican vote was significantly suppressed by this not only in Florida but across the nation, but by how much. It seems clear that if the networks had refrained from telling Republican voters that their candidate has already lost and that they were wasting their time by voting, or even if the mistake had been admitted and Florida pulled back from the Gore column once it became clear that the data upon which it was based should not be relied upon, Mr. Bush would have carried Florida by a large enough margin that Vice-President Gore would have conceded on election night and the entire subsequent debacle avoided. Even more significant, though, is the question of whether Mr. Gore's victory in the popular vote is not also an artifact of the number of Republican voters nationwide who stayed home because the networks insisted for far too long that they would be wasting their time by going to the polls.
Those who doubt the impact of partisan bias in the media need only reflect on how little that aspect of the story has been told and how few Americans even know about it, even though the facts are beyond dispute.
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