Why Trump Will Win Again

In 2016, I correctly predicted that Trump would win, against the odds and the polls: 2016 Prediction. I am now predicting that he will win reelection in 2020. Again (as in 2016), I’m simply using history as our example.

First of all, history shows that it’s very difficult to defeat an incumbent president. In modern times, Bush 43, Carter, and Ford are the only incumbents who lost reelection, and (unlike Trump) they were all weak candidates.

Also, as you know, Joe Biden is a former vice president. No former vice president has ever defeated an incumbent president. Walter Mondale is the only former vice president to run against an incumbent president in recent years, and he lost in a landslide in 1984. Three others lost against non-incumbents in the past 100 years: Al Gore, Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon (in 1960).

We have had only 14 vice presidents that became president. Of those 14 that became president, 13 of them did so in the term immediately following the term where they served as vice president, when the president was leaving office. The only exception to the rule was Richard Nixon, who didn’t become president until eight years after his term as vice president.

So, what was so unusual about Nixon’s victory in 1968? Well, President Lyndon Johnson had lost control of the Democratic Party, which was splitting into four fighting factions. The first consisted primarily of Johnson; Vice President Hubert Humphrey; and, labor unions, led by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. The second group consisted of anti-Vietnam war students and intellectuals, who rallied behind Eugene McCarthy. The third group was Catholics, Hispanics, and African Americans, who rallied behind Robert Kennedy. The fourth group was segregationist white Southerners, who rallied behind George C. Wallace and the American Independent Party.

We were deep into the Vietnam war, and it was one of many issues that splintered the party, and the nation. Johnson could see no way to win the war and no way to unite the party long enough for him to win re-election. Also, he had become more worried about his failing health, and was concerned that he might not live through another four-year term. In 1967, at the age of 59, he secretly commissioned an actuarial study that predicted he would die at 64 (which he did). Therefore, at the end of a speech on March 31, 1968, he shocked the nation when he announced he would not run for re-election.

So, logically (and statistically), Biden wouldn’t be able to unseat an incumbent president short of something shocking and historical. It would have to be something bad enough to make an incumbent president decide not to run — like the unpopular Vietnam War.

How Will He Do it?

Trump merely has to repeat his win in either Michigan or Pennsylvania.

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