With President Trump running for re-election next year in 2020, it makes you wonder whether or not he will serve for one more term as president of the United States. Currently, Donald Trump stands as a fan favorite with an approval rating of forty-four percent and a predicted chance of winning re-election at a staggering seventy percent. In fact, Trump’s approval rating has only continued to climb within the last month as the economy has improved under his presidency. However, even with this in mind, if President Trump’s approval rating were to just drop to around forty percent over the course of the next few months then the likelihood of him winning the next election will become a toss-up. According to an article titled Trump will be ‘very tough to beat’ in 2020 if he gets three things right written by Yen Nee Lee of CNBC, there are three things Donald Trump needs to secure the election: the economy to continue to grow, the border security strategy to continue to gain support, and his foreign policies to show progress. The only factor within this prediction that is actually showing some progress is the U.S economy.
The current economy, under the direction of President Trump, is in fact, performing fairly well compared to how it was in the early 2000s. The current unemployment rate in the United States has reached a record low of 3.9 percent and currently there are more jobs available than the number of citizens seeking employment. In fact, a Gallup Poll was created in which people were asked whether or not seeking a job of high-quality was a possibility in our current climate. From this poll they found very interesting results. Under Trump’s Presidency, sixty-five percent of Americans think that finding a high quality job in our current climate is a good idea. This is the highest percentage that this poll has ever recorded for this question which really goes to show that, in the realm of economics, Trump’s Presidency has had some benefits.
President Trump’s plan to build a wall over the southern border of the United States has caused immense controversy across the nation since it’s proposal in the 2016 election. This wall has been so controversial mainly because many Americans are not willing to fund a wall that will cost over 5.6 billion dollars and that is not guaranteed to fully solve the current problem of illegal immigration in America. In an article titled Poll: Americans are becoming more polarized on the border wall written by Tara Golshan of Vox, it was found that the number of Republicans in support of the wall had gone up from seventy-two percent to an impressive eighty-two percent just within the past year. However, an opposite trend was seen amongst Democrats in the United States. It was found that, over the past year, Democrat support for the wall had begun at thirteen percent at the beginning of last year and has decreased substantially to a mere six percent. I attribute the support for the wall amongst members of the Republican Party to the ongoing persistence of President Trump’s to get the wall built in order to fulfill one of his main campaign promises. Overall, forty-two percent of Americans as of today support the idea of building a wall across the southern border. This is actually not that bad given he has gotten almost half of the United States to agree with this portion of his campaign more than anything else.
The way in which President Trump conducts as well as enforces foreign policy has certainly been one of the weakest features of his presidency. In fact, many Americans also strongly agree that Trump’s ability to conduct foreign policy is poor. According to an article titled A majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s foreign Policy by Jen Kirby of Vox, a poll was taken in which sixty-three percent of Americans disapproved of the way in which President Trump was handling foreign policy. This can be attributed to how aggressive Trump’s rhetoric has been to foreign leaders over the course of his presidency and how this rhetoric has negatively impacted the perception of the United States on a global scale as a whole.
Even with the predicted odds of re-election for President Trump at seventy percent, he will still certainly have his work cut out for him. Competition for President Trump in the 2020 election includes New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Former Texas House of Representative Beto O’Rourke, politician John Delaney, and former rival Bernie Sanders. However, even with these strong competitors up to take his place, President Trump will most likely prevail and win the 2020 election. With the strength of the economy increasing as well as support for the wall gaining more momentum each day, President Trump may actually have this upcoming election in the bag.
Links:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-should-have-a-70-percent-chance-of-winning-in-2020
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/16/18184442/poll-shutdown-border-wall-trump
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/support-for-trumps-wall-reaches-all-time-high-poll
https://www.vox.com/world/2019/1/28/18200489/trump-foreign-policy-poll-russia-north-korea
I appreciated the analysis you gave in this piece, even though I disagree with parts of it. I do believe that Trump will be a formidable candidate in 2020, and should not be taken lightly. He has more money, and power than anyone he will be running against, but I do think it is worth noting that he did only win in 2016 by 70,000 votes across three, normally reliable, Democratic states. Those states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, voted for Democrats overwhelmingly in 2018, a warning sign for Trump.
The factors that you cite as to how Trump will win in 2020 were intriguing to me, and are generally part of conventional political wisdom; that is if the economy is doing well and the country is safe the President will normally win. This is true, but there are many more factors that go into that than simply the unemployment rate, as you cited.
Trump, and Republicans more broadly, have managed to keep the economy growing at the pace that it was growing under the Obama administration, there is no real change in the rate of growth, and have kept the unemployment numbers dropping at about the same rate as well. The economy grew by 2.9% in 2018, matching the high under Obama’s Presidency, but experts are saying that this will be the peak of Trump’s four years as President. Many economists are predicting the yearly growth to start slowing as 2020 approaches, and some are even predicting that a recession will come before, or shortly after the next election. These aren’t guarantees, but it isn’t room to brag, especially when he hasn’t enacted any policy to advance the growth that was happening when he came into office, he has just kept the ship sailing in the same direction.
He also passed a tax cut that many Americans, rightly, believe was designed for the top, not for the working class. That reality won’t bode well for Trump the next time he is on the ballot, especially if the economy starts to slow and people’s paychecks get smaller while the richest don’t suffer at all.
This is all speculative, but the one thing I would note that you didn’t is the importance of the healthcare debate. Nearly every single poll taken shows that healthcare is the number one issue among voters, and Trump and the GOP don’t have a great record on that. They tried to repeal Obamacare with no replacement and kick 20+ million people off of their insurance. As we speak, the administration is refusing to defend the ACA against a lawsuit from multiple states, and if that lawsuit prevails the ACA will be gone, people will lose their healthcare and protections for pre-existing conditions, and the Republicans have no proposal if that were to happen.
I reckon this election is going to be about much more than the economy, and the conventional wisdom of simply looking at that as a metric is going to be fundamentally flawed. The American people care more about other issues, and on those issues, they don’t align with the President.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/trumps-economic-policies-failed-to-deliver-promised-3percent-growth-in-2018.html
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/25/18281788/doj-obamacare-unconstitutional-trump
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/top-15-issues-americans-worried/story?id=29758744
Blake, I first want to say that this is an extremely well-written article and I agree with your main argument entirely – President Trump is going to be hard to beat in this upcoming election.
However, I disagree with what you said about President Trump’s impact on increased jobs within America. I do not disagree that our economy is currently booming, we have more jobs than ever before. However, despite what President Trump claims, is he really the cause of this job inflation?
When reading your article, I remembered something that my high school government teacher once told me, “to really see if a president is actually economically successful you don’t look at the economy in one month, you look at it in one decade.” So, I began digging around sites and found out that, despite his outlandish claims to the contrary, the likelihood that President Trump is the cause of this job inflation is astronomically low. This is because, according to lead economist Alan Blinder, the current state of the economy is much more influenced by previous economic policies rather than any new legislation. The reason why this is the case, according to economist Lee Branstetter, is because there is almost always a lag period of at least a year before a policy starts to get implemented. Therefore, while President Trump may have caused, possibly, a slight increase in jobs, it is unfair to give him most of the credit.
However, this made me realize how successful this event can be for his campaign in this upcoming election, regardless of the fact that he should not receive credit. Unfortunately, when it comes to matters of politics, most Americans are extremely ignorant. In fact, many Americans don’t realize that Obamacare, something that they hate, is the same thing as the Affordable Care Act, something that they love. President Trump can use this ignorance to claim that he is the cause of this economic boom, and the worst part is that many Americans would believe it.
Links:
https://www.marketplace.org/2018/01/29/economy/how-much-credit-should-president-trump-get-economy
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/trump-one-year-on-us-economy-president-inauguration-job-creation-dollar-a8162366.html
I agree with just about everything you said Cole, and think your argument is well made and valid, however. The very last segment of what you wrote is what I struggle with. While there have historically been low polling numbers for the ACA, those numbers are rising. In early 2017 the law was polling around 35% approval, but now after an attempted repeal and an election where the focus was healthcare, the law is around 54% nationwide. This seems to aide your second argument about ignorance a little bit, meaning that people weren’t fully aware of how the law changed, for the better, their own life and that of their family. Upon seeing an attempted repeal plan that would throw 30 million people from insurance, and then seeing Republicans fight against pre-existing conditions and not have a plan come the elections in 2018, they have come around the accepting the law as is.
This is why I think Trump, and Republicans more generally, will struggle in 2020 if the focus point of the election in healthcare, which President Trump has signaled he wants it to be.
I also think it is dangerous for Democrats and those on the left to paint the right, or Trump voters, as ignorant because of their understanding or view of politics. For starters that plays into the coastal elitism argument that they make, and how Democrats are out of touch with the center of the country, and second, it is just not a civil thing to accuse someone of who simply has an opinion. This is not an attack against you, but more of an observation, from being on Twitter way too much, which I need to fix, of the left that we tend to attack and demonize those we disagree with when the 2016 election shows we need to do better with the center of the country if we plan on winning again.
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/10/new-fox-news-poll-obamacares-popularity-is-at-an-a.html
Yes, I agree I should have mentioned healthcare given that it has become such a big topic of discussion as of lately. Furthermore, I found it interesting that you did not think Trump was the reason for the inflation in the economy. If you compare the economy today to when Obama was in office you would definitely agree that Trump has made a huge impact. There are more jobs available then there before and the economy is doing really well.