Not sure why everyone is still talking about his approval ratings. The electoral college system will very well probably lead to his win again in 4 years. Thats of course if we are all around still then.
I think I've said this before, but there are plenty of reasons why his current approval ratings
will lose him his reelection. I think his relatively wide EC margin obscures just how slim his victory really was. The relevant stats:
- Trump won by 77 electoral votes (not counting faithless electors, which I'm too lazy to factor in). Clinton wound up with 227, which means that she'd have needed another 43 to swing the election her way.
- Her real "surprise" losses, Wisconsin and Michigan, account for 28 of those, which means we need to find 15 elsewhere.
- In keeping with WI and MI, where Trump's margin of victory was under 1%, let's take Pennsylvania, with 20 EV and a Trump margin of 0.72%. That nets her a total of 48 EV, and therefore the Presidency.
- In WI, MI, and PA, the actual vote margins were 22,748, 10,704, and 44,292 respectively.
- That means that effectively, Trump won by 77,744 votes. A number soundly beaten by an audience at Wembley.So, considering that he beat perhaps the most hated politician in modern American history by the tiniest of margins, all the Democrats need to do is field a generally acceptable candidate to take the presidency back.
If, of course, his approval ratings stay low. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of confidence that his approval ratings
will stay low. They've already seen a substantial uptick recently thanks to the hurricanes, for which all he had to do was go to Florida and Texas and not literally murder a baby on live television. Rather terrifyingly, I'm sure his insane rhetoric on North Korea will bump him up a bit too. Thankfully, though, even a minuscule erosion in his Republican or Independent support will doom him electorally.
Having said that, we're still pretty fucked. Getting rid of Trump would be a huge deal, because he's a global danger of historic proportions, but the real problem here is on the state level. The Republican Machine, largely funded and coordinated by organizations like the Kochs and ALEC, have absolutely blown the Dems out of the water on that front. So much so that they won't just be able to weasel their way into a near-permanent majority in the House, but might even be able to swing a constitutional convention. Absolutely horrifying.
