Can Trump Pull It Off?

Looking back at 2016, many of the president’s supporters are overcome by a powerful sense of déjà vu. Then too, experts didn’t give Trump a chance. In fact, at this point in 2016 the situation looked even bleaker. A late-breaking scandal led prominent Republican elected officials, including then House Speaker Paul Ryan, to give Trump the cold shoulder.

Despite this unprecedented disavowal by his own party just one month before the election, Trump shocked the world on election night, pulling off one of the biggest upsets in modern political history. This is the reason many experts are not counting Trump out of the 2020 race, even though he has consistently trailed in polls.

“While the president remains the underdog in this race, no one is willing to count him out based on his remarkable showing in 2016,” Neil Newhouse, co-founder of the polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, and lead pollster for the McCain and Romney presidential campaigns, told Mishpacha. “But the path to victory [270 Electoral College votes] is a very narrow one, with limited opportunities to make up ground between now and Election Day.

“The 2016 election was more of a referendum on Hillary Clinton, and right now the 2020 election is a referendum on President Trump,” he added. “The president’s team needs to continue to push to make this race more about Joe Biden and his shortcomings than about President Trump.”