With Donald Trump announcing running for re-election in 2020, there are questions if this eccentric POTUS who launched the trade war and disrupted the global order could really win again.
In mid-August this year, NBC and the Wall Street Journal jointly released a poll. The results published has shown a drop in Trump's overall support rate, falling 2 percentage points to 43% from July. It is worth noting that with Trump's ways of handling the economy, the support rate of respondents has also declined. The poll shows that 49% of respondents expressed their support, still have a slight advantage compared with the 46% who opposed. However, this figure also fell by 2%, compared with the 51% support rate in May.
Although Trump's support rate has declined, many still believe that Trump is likely to win the U.S. election next year. Tracking the situation, quite a number of people think that Trump will be able to win not because of his strength, but because his opponent the Democratic Party, has yet to showcase any worthy presidential candidate. In June this year, there were 21 Democratic presidential candidates including former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and the ever-popular Bernie Sanders. After rounds of competitive speeches, the evaluations on both Biden and Sanders have not exactly been that high. Because of the relative weakness among his opponents, many expect Trump to become the POTUS for another term.
Since the election will only happen next year, we will have to wait and see what outcome shall come to pass. However, we can also try to make some preliminary judgments on the election looking from another perspective.
For Trump, as a "Twitter POTUS", he has stirred up the world through social media during his first term. Although his way of running the country through Twitter is peculiar by normal standards, the world has so far gotten used to that. Trump's rulings by Twitter is actually informational warfare under non-war conditions.
According to Facebook's data, Facebook's monthly active users as of December 31, 2018, was 2.32 billion, an increase of 9% over the same period last year. As of July 2019, the countries with the largest number of Facebook users were the United States, Brazil, and Indonesia, with 190 million, 130 million, and 120 million users respectively. Looking at Twitter, according to the annual report released by Twitter on December 31, 2018, its average monetizable daily active users (mDAU) in the fourth quarter was 126 million. Among them, the average number of mDAU in the U.S. market is 27 million, with the average mDAU in the international market being 99 million.
It should be noted that for these 190 million + 27 million users, assuming that they are the supporters and opponents of Trump's voter base, if only 50% of them are Trump supporters, Facebook would have about 95 million of them, and Twitter 12.5 million. The sum of the two is about 107 million. The population of the United States is more than 300 million, and from the crude calculation here, one can deduce that most Americans are in fact not Trump's supporters.
In addition to this calculation, we can also observe the situation in the United States from other aspects. One is by observing the daily situations. According to field observations by ANBOUND's researchers, most Americans on social media are not supporters of Trump. It should also be considered that although the Democratic Party is less than ideal, Trump's own actions are boosting the support of the Americans for the Democrats. As Trump continues to act in his erratic fashion, voters will be driven to feel that the Democrats are a more reliable alternative. Finally, one has to consider the logic of how many votes Trump can get. A noteworthy fact is that when Trump was elected for the first time in 2016, he won fewer votes than his opponent. He was elected because of the first-past-the-post electoral system. Now, years on from when Trump took office, he has probably gained more opponents than ever before. Even if the element of first-past-the-post is considered, Trump may not have the edge that he used to have.
Trump is also facing another crucial factor for the election next year, which is the slowing down of the U.S. economy, and there could even be a recession. David J. Firestein, the executive director of the University of Texas at Austin's China Public Policy Center (CPPC), has recently stated that if President Trump continues to increase tariffs on his trade policy in China that hurt the Americans economically, he may "lose the slim electoral edge". The public policy expert has also said that Trump will either become a "tariff president" or a "two-term president". If the U.S. economy begins to decline next year, it will surely be a negative factor for Trump.
Final analysis conclusion:
Considering a variety of situations, Trump may not necessarily win the White House again in the 2020 U.S. election. Even if he does, it would not be an easy victory for him.
