… It turns out that Trump does not walk on political water. He does not defy political gravity. This is very bad news for him heading into the 2020 campaign.
Trump was elected President with the worst favorable rating ever. This led many to speculate that traditional measures of gauging a politician’s popularity had been rendered obsolete by him.
Such a view ignored a key factor of the 2016 campaign: Hillary Clinton. Clinton was the second least liked major-party nominee of all time. Nearly 20% of 2016 voters held unfavorable views of Clinton and Trump. Among these voters, Trump won overwhelmingly. That is, he was seen as the lesser of two evils.
The 2018 midterm elections were the key test over whether the Republican Party could do well with an unpopular Trump and without an unpopular Clinton in the political arena. The answer was a resounding no. CONT.
Harry Enten, CNN