KleinerKiller wrote:Four more years of Trump will do even more irreparable damage to the country and the world,
You misspelled both "
eight" and "reengreatenment."
Seriously, though, it's clear that impeachment is not moving Trump's base at all. Some of them appear to genuinely believe that nothing Trump did is impeachable and his opponents know it. Others appear to recognize that his behavior is problematic, but retreat to saying that all that matters is the economy/Supreme Court/owning the libs and also that the impeachment process is a horrific violation of due process and an unconstitutional coup.
Amazingly, Trump's approval rating has gone up by 1% in FiveThirtyEight's tracker. It's not clear yet whether this is noise, or Republicans are right and the impeachment actually has backfired, very slightly. His numbers are better than they've been almost any time in his presidency, but are still remarkably steady, and at a level which is abysmal for an incumbent in an economy this good. Various polls show him beating various Democratic challengers or those challengers beating him, but always with poll numbers that exactly match his approval ratings.
Poll numbers on impeachment generally show that a majority of Americans support it, and the number who oppose is about 1% more than the number who think Trump is doing a good job.
Therefore, in a functional democracy, Trump and the GOP would be doomed. Unfortunately, that's not what we have here.
There is basically no chance that Trump wins the popular vote. But the chance he wins the Electoral College is about 50/50. The only states Democrats look likely to flip are Michigan and Arizona, all other swing states Trump won are tossups or lean GOP. The Florida GOP has successfully eviscerated the law that would re-enfranchise three million ex-felons, so Florida probably still leans red. In fact, handicappers have North Carolina more likely to vote for the Democrat than Florida, and Trump's probably favored there too.
I can see the following as a very a plausible scenario: The Democratic candidate flips Arizona, makes major inroads in several farming states where Trump's trade war is hurting (Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, and possibly Montana) without winning any of them (on that list, only Iowa is a swing state) and red states where there are large Mormon populations (Utah, Idaho), make major inroads in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, and consolidate their margins in already blue states, winning the popular vote by twice the margin Hillary did in 2016 and even winning an outright majority. Meanwhile, Trump narrowly holds Michigan and even more narrowly flips Maine and Minnesota and crows about how he improved his EV margin by four and won a state Republicans haven't won since Nixon.
There is basically no chance that Republicans win the House popular vote, but in 2018, it was estimated it would take Democrats winning by about 6-7% for them to actually win the House. I'm not sure if it's quite as bad this time, given that Pennsylvania and North Carolina had their maps redrawn by court order, but it's still bad. And since the Democratic margin on the generic congressional ballot is about 6% and their margin depends on Democrats in districts that voted for Trump, it's entirely possible that the GOP retakes the House.
The Senate is anti-democratic by design, so no use complaining about that, but to take the Senate, the Democrats need to net five seats, or four seats and the presidency, unless by some miracle Doug Jones holds on in Alabama (spoiler alert: he won't). Their best five prospects are Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, Arizona, and Iowa. After that, you're getting into places like Georgia, Montana, Texas, and Kentucky (ousting Yertle would be so sweet I would be able to briefly forget that Trump was re-elected). Moreover, Gary Peters in Michigan is a really weak incumbent, and if Trump wins Minnesota (as he very well might), Tina Smith could be in trouble too.
It's not entirely outside the realm of possibility that the Democrat gets an outright majority of the popular vote for President, Democratic candidates win an outright majority of the votes cast for the House, and yet we end up with another Trump term, a GOP House, and an enlarged GOP majority in the Senate. Which has nothing to do with impeachment, but you know that the GOP will spin such a victory as a resounding rejection of attempts by Democrats to subvert The Will of The People.™