I read a lot of news and listen to a lot of opinions about what’s going on re Trump and the 2020 election.
I hear a lot about the static Trump base, how Trump isn’t losing his base voters. And I see a lot of polls affirming the numbers of his base, polls claiming a huge majority of Republicans don’t support impeachment and support Trump, while 62% of Republicans will certainly vote for him again.
I know Trump goes around having rallies of his base and, if we pay attention, we can see and hear the same pretty vile and crazy stuff from him and from his base at those rallies. It’s the same people, it’s the same pitch.
Here’s why I’m not panicking: the numbers.
What the polls show is that Trump’s numbers are not moving much at all. He goes to his rallies, and people scream and he’s happy and he says things that make a lot of us blanche. But he’s not winning over people who didn’t vote for him in the first place. And that 62% number (see above, at the link) means that his numbers are going down. If they weren’t, almost 100% of people who voted for Trump would be saying they’d certainly vote for him again.
So I decided to look at the hard numbers. Not poll numbers, but actual registered voters numbers. Here’s what I found:
There are 235,248,000 registered voters in the United States. That’s an interesting number because in the 2016 presidential elections, the total number of voters for Trump, Hillary and third party candidates was 136,669,276. That means approximately 98,579,000 registered voters did not vote. That’s a lot of voters.
Now, how do these numbers break down by party?
72,927,880 (31%) are registered as Democrats.
56,459,520 (24%) are registered Republicans.
98,804,160 (42%) are registered Independents — almost the exact number of people who didn’t vote in 2016.
So, first, realize there are more Democratic voters than Republican voters. If Independents decided to vote — and split between Democrats and Republicans — there would still be more support for Democrats than Republicans.
So what about the Democratic Party presidential candidates versus Trump? Quinnipiac just released a poll concerning just that. (I tried to find how Quinnipiac phrased the questions in order to get the results, but was not able to. So I can only presume the question they asked was something like, “If you were voting for the presidency today, would you vote for Joe Biden or Donald Trump?” Et cetera, with all the other candidates.)
However they got the results, here they are:
Biden 51%, Trump 42%
Sanders 51%, Trump 43%
Warren 50%, Trump 43%
Bloomberg 48%, Trump 42%
Buttigieg 48%, Trump 43%
Klobuchar 47%, Trump 43%
To me, this means something pretty simple: ANY of the Democratic candidates would defeat Trump.
And, even more simple, Trump’s voting base never goes above 43%.
One lesson to be garnered from these numbers is that each of us should not be considering a vote for the person she/he thinks can beat Trump. Anyone can beat Trump. Each of us should be voting for the person he/she thinks will best represent this country’s values, laws and hopes for the future.
So I think we can all calm down a bit but…the big lesson in these numbers is EVERYONE who is registered to vote must vote in November 2020.