Here’s how to guarantee that Donald Trump loses in 2020

| 11:00 pm EST January 22, 2020
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There’s a difficulty in relying on cable news for political analysis. Eighty percent of the pundits on television – even if they lean your direction politically – are going out of their way to say controversial things just to try to startle you into staying tuned in. It creates the illusion that the current political landscape is overly dramatic and overly complex, and that it’ll all fall to pieces if you look away from your TV even for a moment.

But if you ask any political operative who isn’t busy mugging for the camera, you’ll find that the landscape is actually pretty straightforward. Everyone in politics will tell you the same thing: Donald Trump’s current approval rating average, which is a smidge over 40% (we don’t include Rasmussen in our average), gives him roughly zero chance of winning in 2020. That doesn’t mean he’s going to lose; far from it. What it does mean is that if Trump can’t improve his numbers before November, he will lose. If Trump gains five points before the election, he’ll have a decent chance of winning. If he gains ten points, he’ll have a strong chance of winning.

The 2020 election is truly as straightforward as that, and everything else is just noise. Every event that happens between now and November, including his current impeachment trial, has to be viewed through a lens of how it’ll impact Trump’s approval rating. Cable news once again threatens to overcomplicate this by reporting each new individual poll as if it were the only poll – particularly if it’s an outlier that’s wildly off from the polling averages – while pretending the averages don’t exist. But if you look at the averages, you’ll see that Trump’s approval hasn’t really moved by any appreciable amount in two years.

This means that of all the stunts Trump has pulled to try to boost his approval rating – conspiring with Ukraine, attacking Iran, the DOJ Inspector General report, and so on – none of them have succeeded at all. This is important, because the clock is ticking. He has ten months left to find a way to significantly boost his approval rating, which sounds like a lot of time until you consider that he’s spent the past couple years trying and failing to boost it by even an inch.

So if you want to guarantee that Donald Trump loses, you just have to make sure that his approval rating remains as awful as it currently is. That means continuing to work on the people in your personal circle and online circle who are on the fence about him. Make sure they don’t get sucked in by his latest stunt. Make sure they remain committed to showing up and voting against him. And make sure the fervent anti-Trump people in your circle also remain motivated to keep leaning on the fence sitters in their circles.

If you consistently do this, Donald Trump will lose. On the other hand, if you get discouraged by Trump’s next stunt, or by the media’s next ratings-driven cycle of periodically insisting that Trump is winning, and you allow that discouragement to prevent you from putting in the necessary work before November, Trump could win. It really comes down to you. Let’s work hard and work smart, and put and end to this nonsense in November.