The 2020 race in six questions
In the last 100 years, American voters granted second terms to 10 of the 14 incumbent presidents who sought them. That means Americans chose to give their presidents a second term 70% of the time. In that sense, history favors Trump. However, the four incumbent presidents denied second terms fell into the same trap: a lousy economy. The Great Depression doomed Herbert Hoover. Gerald Ford (an unelected incumbent) couldn’t “whip inflation now” (WIN), even sporting a WIN button on his lapel. Double-digit interest rates did in the hapless Jimmy Carter. An unexpected recession relegated George H.W. Bush to a single term. Trump can’t be blamed for America’s wretched economy — it was humming along until it caught COVID-19 — but Trump must play the hand he’s been dealt. And it’s the same hand that dealt out the four one-term incumbents noted above.
History is replete with presidential candidates who flourished in July and vanished in November. Remember Mike Dukakis? You can be forgiven for forgetting, but Dukakis blew a 17-point midsummer lead in 1988, with George H.W. Bush beating him by 8% in November. To gain some insight into this year’s RealClearPolitics (RCP) average poll showing Biden with a 7.4% lead over Trump at press time, I checked in with RCP’s senior political analyst Sean Trende to see if pollsters are making adjustments to account for the 40 states that permit early voting, or mail-in ballots, which gets underway in the third week of September. “Right now, no,” Trende says. “After people start voting, pollsters will start asking people if they have already voted to account for early voting. This probably makes polling more accurate, although there is potentially the problem of lying about whether you voted or not.”
Point to remember: Even the best of polls is only a snapshot in time, not a prediction.
Politico speculated last week that after President Trump cast doubt on the legitimacy of early voting, many of Trump’s supporters may choose to show up to the polls, rather than mail in their ballots, which means the polls taken right after early voting begins could favor Biden even more. In the big picture, mail-in voting is nothing new. It’s been going on in America for 20 years and close to half of the world’s democracies allow some form of early voting. A group of Stanford University researchers published a report in late June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that vote-by-mail has no impact on partisan turnout and only a marginal impact on percentage of turnout. But there’s one big caveat. They noted that as the issue of mail voting becomes increasingly partisan, Blue states may ramp up their programs faster than Red states. That being the case, as the Trump campaign revs up for the stretch run, they would be advised to find a way to encourage vote-by-mail so that it prods, rather than discourages, Republican turnout.
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