Donald Trump Would Lose The Electoral Vote In 2020, Predicts ‘The Observer’

Donald Trump will lose the 2020 presidential election to a hypothetical Democrat, according to some number-crunching done by the Observer writer John A. Tures.

As of this writing, no Democrat or Republican has officially announced that they definitely are (or definitely are not) going to run against Donald Trump in 2020, although some, such as billionaire Mark Cuban, continue to broadly hint at it, as reported by the Inquisitr. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped at least two pundits, one of them being Tures, from looking at the data and seeing where the winds may be blowing when it comes to whoever does run against Trump in 2020. And from where Tures sits, it doesn’t look good for Trump.

Specifically, Tures looked at the Gallup Organization’s Tracking Trump approval ratings in each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. He then compared Trump’s approval rating with his disapproval rating in each state, and put states where his disapproval rating is higher (called a “net negative” in the polling industry) in the Hypothetical Democratic Opponent column. As of this writing, Trump has a net negative in 26 states, compared to 13 net-negative states at the beginning of his term.

What’s more, a majority of those net-negative states have larger populations and, thus, are worth more electoral votes.

So if the election were held today, and if every state in which Trump currently has a net negative were carried by Trump’s hypothetical Democrat opponent on November 3, 2020, then the Democrat would take 291 electoral votes to Trump’s 247.

Of course, with the election nearly two years away, calling electoral votes based on polling data is something of a fool’s game, admits Tures. What’s more, in some of the states in question, the margin between a net negative for Trump and a net positive for Trump appears to be a very thin one.

Unfortunately for Trump, those thin margins don’t play out in his favor. Only Utah, which currently counts in the net-negative-for-Trump column by only 2 percent, or well within the margin of error for most scientific polls, could theoretically be switched back to a net-positive for Trump just on polling errors alone. Several states are in the net-positive-for-Trump column but are only there by within one to three percentage points, those states being Arizona (+1 Trump), Ohio (+1), Georgia (+3), Florida (+3), North Carolina (+3).

Of course, a lot can change between now and 2020, and history hasn’t always turned low approval ratings in the middle of a president’s term into a win for his opponent. George W. Bush, for example, was suffering from low approval ratings in mid-2004, yet he still managed to beat his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, and win the election.