There are still 10 months to go until the first ballots will be cast in the 2020 presidential caucuses and primaries. The identity of the Democratic nominee, in all likelihood, will not be known for more than a year. Nevertheless, it is not too early to begin speculating about Donald Trump’s chances of winning a second term in the White House. That is because when an incumbent is running for reelection, the presidential election is largely a referendum on that incumbent’s performance. The challenger’s characteristics and the general election campaign itself matter only at the margins.
In this article, I present the results of a modified version of the “time for change” forecasting model that I have used to correctly predict the winner of the national popular vote in every presidential election between 1992 and 2012. And while the model failed to predict Hillary Clinton’s narrow popular vote victory in 2016, I noted at the time that Trump might well fall short of his predicted vote given his extraordinary weaknesses as a candidate. As it was, the model predicted Trump to win the national two-party popular vote by three points, but Clinton won it by two points. CONT.
Alan I. Abramowitz (Emory), Sabato’s Crystal Ball