The 2020 elections are still 22 months away, but the political world is on edge.
A vast number of Democrats have already announced their decision to enter the race, with dozens more to come, and experts are busy assessing each fresh candidate’s chances for the nomination.
One of the first questions is whether Democratic voters will look for a centrist candidate with Midwestern appeal or a candidate with a more ideological background and ties to the Trump resistance. Prepare for numerous comparisons to the challenges Republicans faced in choosing between Tea Party and establishment candidates.
As for the general election, the first assessments have already been released in the Cook Political Report, which shows that 232 electoral college votes lean Democratic, 220 lean Republican and 86 fall into the reject category. The list seems quite reasonable and is a telling signal of a coalition change that Arizona is a failure but Ohio is not.
Cook’s projections suggest Democrats could defeat President Donald Trump simply by winning back the Midwestern states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. However, for the party that has moved far to the left in recent years, a victory against a centrist candidate may not be enough.
I understand a political junkie’s desire to explore these topics, and I’ve even done some of it myself. A ScottRasmussen.com poll found that the typical Democrat would beat President Trump by 6 points and Mitt Romney by 12.
But while I understand that, I encourage political junkies to remember that most Americans currently have no idea who most of the Democratic candidates are. At this point in the 2007-2008 cycle, few expected that Barack Obama would win the nomination and become president for two terms. At this point, the chances of selecting a winner are even smaller.
It doesn’t really matter to me whether political junkies obsess over the next election, but I worry that all this early focus on candidates and tactics could distract us from the more vital factors that will actually decide the election.
The largest economy is, of course, the American economy. Currently, the Job Creators Network/ScottRasmussen.com Weekly Pulse shows that 45 percent of voters rate the economy as good or excellent. That’s not a bad number, but it’s down significantly from the mid-50s last fall.
What’s more, our four-week rolling average now shows that 33 percent of voters think the economy is getting worse, while just 31 percent say it’s getting better. For the first time, we observed that negative expectations outweighed positive ones. Perhaps this is just a ephemeral glitch caused by the government shutdown and general political dysfunction. We’ll find out in a month or two.
However, if this is a sustained change and we reach a point where people start to see that their own finances are getting better rather than better, then political analysis will become much easier. President Trump’s re-election will be almost impossible.
If the economy holds steady, there are a number of issues, such as immigration and health care, that pose challenges for both sides. How these issues are resolved will also have a significant impact on the election.
So if you want to understand the 2020 election today, look at what’s happening in the real world, not the political world.
Scott Rasmussen is the publisher of ScottRasmussen.com. He is the author of “The Sun Is Still Rising: Politics Has Failed, but America Will Not.”
