With all of the bluster and bloviating coming from the Trump camp as we head into the 2020 election season, it’s hard to reconcile his overconfidence with his consternation. It seems that every day, Trump has some new excuse as to why his numbers are flagging — fake news, illegal voters in the polls, or just plain cheating he says the Democrats are doing. And yet it was mere days ago that he told a (tiny) room full of supporters at a fundraiser that he expected to win California in 2020.
That’s not going to happen, of course. You could reasonably expect to win a jackpot every time you put a dollar in a slot machine for the rest of your life before a Republican — let alone Donald Trump — won deep blue California.
America was shocked, however, when Trump won a handful of swing states in 2016 that basically handed him the election. Nobody reasonably thought Trump could win then, or in those kinds of areas, but whatever confluence of events precipitated his victory, it was “purple” states that came through for him.
This time around, it looks like he’ll have no such luck. According to the latest polling from Morning Consult, the polling partner for the New York Times, Bloomberg, and Politico, the President’s approval is way down across the board, including in the states he absolutely needed to pull off a win in 2016.
Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — who together comprise 93 electoral votes — have all seen double-digit downward swings for Trump, from 17 points down in PA to a whopping 24 points down in the home of Mar-a-Lago, his Winter White House. That’s 19 more electoral votes than the margin Trump even won with last time around.
In fact, the Morning Consult website has a tool to search the decline in approval for each state since Trump’s inauguration, and the only state that’s not in double digits is South Dakota — and even there, it’s 9 percent. No wonder he’s been on a tear on social media and in interviews — the man is clearly shaken to his core.
Considering his massive loss in the popular vote, and his party’s massive loss in the 2018 midterms in nearly every single race where a Republican was actually vulnerable, it looks like Trump truly has an uphill battle to wage, no matter what he tells the folks at his private dinner fundraisers.
Featured image via screen capture
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