Donald Trump is in big trouble. Polls released last week from Monmouth University, CNBC, the Economist, ABC News/Washington Post, and CBS News have Trump trailing Biden by 4 to 11 points nationally. On average, Trump is down by 7.8 points.
State-level polling is equally grim. Biden is consistently polling ahead of Trump in the swing states. Perhaps even more concerning for Trump, Biden is statistically tied with Trump in a number of traditionally red states, including electoral vote rich Arizona and Texas.
Trump’s Base is not Big Enough
Trump’s struggles are unsurprising. To be sure, his largely white, Christian, and rural base is rock solid. His problem is that these voters are nowhere close to a majority. Trump is struggling to attract support among every ethnic and racial minority group. He is underwater with women. The partisan gender gap rivals the largest we have ever seen. He is also trailing Biden among white college graduates—a group that turned against the Republicans en masse in the 2018 Midterm.
For an incumbent president, this is an extremely weak electoral position—possibly the weakest we have seen since the invent of modern scientific polling.
The reasons for Trump’s struggles are clear. Throughout his tenure, Trump has made few attempts to expand his coalition. He is counting on a shrinking slice of the electorate to carry him to victory. This is not a good strategy. He was warned.
The 2012 Republican Postmortem
Following Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama, the Republican Party released a remarkable post-mortem. The report identified a host of problems: messaging, campaign infrastructure, campaign finance, and voter mobilization and made recommendations on how to fix them. Most importantly, the report identified one key problem: “The minority groups that President Obama carried with 80 percent of the vote in 2012 are on track to become a majority of the nation’s population by 2050 (pg. 12).”
The report made clear that the Republicans were risking permanent minority status unless the party could attract new voters. The authors made a number of proposals to increase support among “demographic partners,” including championing comprehensive immigration reform and adopting a “tone that takes into consideration of the Hispanic community.”
Donald Trump turned this report on its head. Trump made no effort to expand the Republican coalition. In fact, he is taking every opportunity to “build a wall” between the Republicans and their “demographic partners.”
Trump won in spite of his strategy, not because of it. The combination of an unpopular Democratic candidate, strong third-party showings, an October surprise from James Comey, and an Electoral College/popular vote inversion allowed Trump to win with only 46 percent of the vote. Trump threaded the needle.
Sometimes candidates do everything right and still lose. Other times, they do everything wrong and win. Trump accomplished the latter in 2016. He employed a strategy with a low chance of success, caught every break imaginable, and won. The problem is that Republican’s 2012 postmortem was fundamentally correct, and Trump is doing nothing to address these long-term problems.
Trump will compound the GOP’s problems in 2020. Winning teams rarely change strategies. Most of the time this makes sense—go with a strategy until the other side proves they can stop it. Obama won in 2012 with a coalition that was remarkably similar to the one he formed in 2008. Trump is trying to do the same thing. The problem is Obama won 53-percent of the vote in 2008. Trump won 46-percent in 2016.
What My Research Shows
I document the political ramifications of America’s changing demographic landscape in a number of research papers (2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2018, 2019, 2020). I draw a couple points from this research that are relevant for understanding the 2020 presidential election.
My first point is that despite perceptions, 2016 did not produce a dramatic electoral realignment. Despite the narratives, Trump’s coalition looked much like Romney’s in 2012 and McCain’s in 2008—he performed very well among whites without college degrees. However, he did not do dramatically better among this group than his predecessors.
The biggest difference between the Romney and Trump coalitions is that Trump performed worse among college educated whites. This is a continuation of a long secular trend—professional class whites are moving away from the Republican Party and have been for some time. Trump accelerated this trend.
Trump did not forge a new coalition that will endure into the future, Trump won with a stripped-down version of the traditional Republican coalition. Barely.
My second point is that the past four years have done nothing to alter the foundational transformation of the American electorate. Latinos and Asians are continually more powerful voting blocs. Both of these groups will strongly oppose Trump in 2020.
As I, and others have noted, the Republican Party could offset the political consequences of these demographic changes by winning a modestly larger proportion of the white vote—moving from consistently winning about 60%-61% of the white vote nationally to something closer to 64 or 65%. This is where Trump’s struggles among college educated whites becomes so damning.
There is very little room for the Republicans to form a majority coalition without winning more minorities or more college educated whites or some combination of the two. Performing poorly among both groups will lead to defeat. Trump is particularly ill-suited to make either happen.
Trump’s 2020 Path is Extremely Narrow
My argument is not that Trump cannot win. One lesson to learn from 2016 it is to not to confuse the unlikely with the impossible. Rather, there is no evidence to suggest that Trump has done anything to alter the country’s long-term political and demographic fundamentals.
As a result, Trump’s ceiling is low, especially by the standards of an incumbent president. He stands little chance of forming a popular vote majority. He is relying on being able to thread the needle in the Electoral College once again. It is a strategy with low probability of success.
