The Search for Trump’s 2020 Spoiler Candidate Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

The Search for Trump’s 2020 Spoiler Candidate
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 3h

First, I’m always hesitant to recommend people. Because inevitably they’ll say something dumb and people will blame for it. But I’m really enjoying Aaron Blake’s campaign commentary and number-crunching – consistently shrewd and considered. His column today focuses me on a basic point: it’s very hard to see how President Trump can win reelection in a high turnout head to head race. He’s just stuck way too far down below 50% public support. This is my general thinking of course because, as I’ve been arguing, Trump is in much worse shape than people seem to imagine, at least until quite recently. But it’s worth zooming in on those qualifiers: high turnout and head to head race.

When we say it’s hard to base much on polls 18 months before an election that’s because a President can simply get more popular. Things change and a President has unique powers to change things with the powers of the presidency. They can goose the economy. They can focus on pulling off some big foreign policy coup. They can distribute some of the limitless patronage that comes with the presidency. What stands out about Trump isn’t that he’s that unpopular. Every recent president has spent some time in the low-mid-forties. The key is that Trump has never been higher than that. And you can’t say that about any other elected President at any time in recent history.

A lot of things can happen in 18 months. But Trump getting much more popular doesn’t seem like one of those things. So let’s go back to “high turnout and head to head race.”

One critical factor in Trump’s 2016 election was depressing Democratic turnout in a handful of key states and just as much having two other candidates drawing off a non-trivial number of votes – Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. Between the two of them, they pulled almost 4.5% of the popular vote – almost 5% if you add in Evan McMullin.

Some people say, well … Trump was super unpopular when he got elected the first time. So put in a spoiler candidate or two and he can do it again. It’s not quite that simple. The ingrained and intense opposition to Trump after more than two years as President is significantly different from 2016 when he remained an unknown quantity to a significant degree and few people thought he could win. (Trump’s biggest liability is that more than 50% of the electorate – sometimes significantly more – says they’ll never vote for him for reelection.) It’s also true that we appear to be headed to a massive turnout election, possibly higher than any presidential election in a hundred years.

If turnout could reach as high as two-thirds of the vote-eligible electorate, Trump and his campaign can’t do anything to knock that down to 50%. But driving down turnout and fielding at least one spoiler candidate, ideally one anti-Trump candidate on the right and the left (a bit like you had in 2016), seem like necessary prerequisites for a Trump victory in 2020. People around Trump certainly realize that or they will. So that is a critical thing to keep an eye on.

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