{"id":447480,"date":"2019-07-10T05:07:43","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T05:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.moldova.org\/en\/?p=447480"},"modified":"2019-08-13T13:06:09","modified_gmt":"2019-08-13T13:06:09","slug":"2020-u-s-presidential-election-toss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.moldova.org\/en\/2020-u-s-presidential-election-toss\/","title":{"rendered":"The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Is a Toss-Up"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 6<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

This opinion piece was written by\u00a0Dr. Ionas Aurelian Rus, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College (USA). The opinion does not necessarily represent the opinion of the editorial staff of Moldova.org.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The conventional wisdom is that the U.S. presidential election of 2020 will be won by the Democratic presidential candidate, most likely Joe Biden. Yet a careful look at the evidence indicates that it is a true toss-up. If Donald Trump will win the election, this will be made possible by his potential victory in Wisconsin, a toss-up state, and one of the three Blue Wall States that the Democrats presumably need to win, together with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I will also discuss some insights from Ohio.<\/p>\n

The most typical “fundamentals” are favoring Trump, for example, prosperity and possibly peace. Yet Trump has also often not been wise or even rational as president, and a majority of the voters indicate that they do not plan to vote for him, and they will not. Yet Trump could win the Electoral College again, just as in 2016, though he will almost certainly lose the popular vote for the second time.<\/p>\n

Any discussion will have to start from the opinion polls for the states that voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 as well as Arizona, which went Republican in the presidential elections since 2000, and where the Democrats won the Congressional elections of 2018. Arizona is seemingly a toss-up, but there is indirect evidence that the appointed Republican Senator Martha McSally is ahead in the polls against the declared Democratic candidate Mark Kelly, the husband of former (Democratic) Representative Gabbie Giffords, who was shot by a gunman. While one could argue that looking at the Senate election polls is not very relevant to the presidential election results, we should not forget that we are in the age of Trump. In Wisconsin in 2016, the Republican Senate incumbent Ron Johnson was ahead of the former long-serving Democratic Senator Russ Feingold in the last two opinion polls. Throughout the country, some individuals have hesitated to indicate that they plan to vote for Trump, but not for other Republican candidates, in the polls.\u00a0 This was also a proxy for a Trump victory, and it led to my correct, but rather late, prediction of a Trump victory in 2016 that I will discuss below.<\/p>\n

At around noon on election day (November 8, 2016), after I voted and went to other polling locations in the Greater Cincinnati area and observed a lower than expected turnout among African-Americans and young people in various places, and talked to a student of Miami University, Ohio, who was asking exit poll questions, I updated my prediction. I had previously thought that there was a 60-67% chance that the presidential elections would be won by Hillary Clinton. Yet I revised my earlier predictions and I predicted correctly on the basis of what I had observed, and the Wisconsin Senate polls discussed above, that Donald Trump would win Wisconsin and the presidency. I told my Introduction to American Politics night students at 6:23 PM ET that Donald Trump would win the presidency. I was right and, as some of my night students told me, rather unique.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump is likely to win in Iowa according to the latest opinion poll even against Joe Biden, just as the Republican senator elected in 2014, Joni Ernst will likely win the Senate race according to the polls. One senses that, notwithstanding the Democratic House of Representatives victories in 2018, Iowa will get into the Republican column for a number of presidential elections. Yet the lack of exit polls for the 2018 elections makes the task of the analyst more difficult. Florida is also Republican-leaning or a toss-up according to the latest opinion polls, after the Republican victories of 2018, and after Obama’s opening to Communist Cuba alienated many Cuban-Americans.<\/p>\n

Ohio, the state in which I live and teach at the University of Cincinnati, is still inherently a toss-up state, notwithstanding various analyses to the contrary. The Republican governor Mike DeWine, elected in 2018, is more popular among the Democrats who had voted against him than was John Kasich, the Republican governor in 2011-2019. This is so partly because he is not in any way anti-union, unlike John Kasich, who had signed into law the union-busting Senate Bill 5 in 2011. The Ohio voters voted in a referendum to repeal it by a margin of 61.59% to 38.41% on November 8, 2011. I believe that a key reason why Obama won Ohio in 2012 was because the Republican Party was seen as the party of union-busting. Yet some of those who had anti-Senate Bill 5 lawn signs in 2011 and pro-Obama signs in 2012, including various cops and firefighters, had pro-Trump signs in 2016. I have identified the following types of individuals who had voted for somebody other than Trump in 2016 who now support Trump and plan to vote for him in 2020: 1. several Gary Johnson Libertarian voters, 2. several Bernie Sanders, then Jill Stein (Green), voters and 3. several Hillary Clinton voters who believe that the Democrats have gone too far to the left after the 2016 elections. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had attracted some ideologically libertarian and even Libertarian Party voters.<\/p>\n

According to the Ohio 2018 exit poll, 6% of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 voters voted for Mike DeWine in 2018. Interestingly enough, 48% of the Ohio voters desired a Democratic-controlled Senate and 47% a Republican-controlled Senate according to the same exit poll, in which 53% indicated that they approved of the job that Trump was doing. Yet the intent of some voters was not to replace but to contain or balance, Trump.<\/p>\n

Another interesting, yet unique, pattern in Ohio is that most voters from union families, and most union voters, voted for Trump in 2016 (54%). In 2018, among the members of union households, 46% declared that they had voted for the Democratic candidate for governor Richard Cordray and 36% for Mike DeWine; 18% did not answer. The latter percentage is huge. I believe that they overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, voted for Mike DeWine, who probably won the union vote. Or at least this was my impression after talking to local\u00a0union members. To be sure, the latest opinion poll from late November 2018 showed that Biden and most other Democratic candidates were performing better than Trump in Ohio. Yet I believe that the state will probably vote for Trump.<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding the Democratic victory in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in November 2018, the evidence from 2019 is not necessarily encouraging for the Democrats in Wisconsin, which will, I believe, be a toss-up state in 2020. The Republican Brian Hagedorn won a statewide election for the Wisconsin Superior Court in April 2019 with 50.2%, and the Democrat Lisa Neubauer lost with 49.8%. While one should not overstate the importance of this Republican victory (or of the latest opinion poll from late April 2019, in which Trump is ahead of Biden by 46-42%, it shows that Wisconsin is clearly\u00a0a toss-up state. Some hints of that appear in the exit poll for the 2018 elections in Wisconsin. The Republican, Tea Party governor\u00a0Scott Walker (2011-2019), who lost the re-election race for governor in November 2018\u00a0by 48.44% to 49.54% against Professor Tony Evers, had the approval of 49% and the disapproval of 48% of those who were polled. Moreover, 47% had a favorable and 48% an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, unlike in the other states that were won by the Democrats in 2018, where more people had a favorable than an unfavorable view of the Democrats. The comparable\u00a0percentages for the Republicans were 47% and 50%. Moreover, only 49% of the exit poll answers indicated a preference for a Democratic-controlled Senate, lower than in other states won by the Democrats; 46% preferred the Republicans.<\/p>\n

About 48% of the Wisconsin voters who answered the November 2018\u00a0exit poll thought that Donald Trump’s immigration policies were too tough, while 16% thought that they were not tough enough and 33% thought that they were about right. By contrast, in all the other states won by the Democrats, more people thought that Trump’s immigration policies were too tough. In retrospect, the problem for the Republicans in Wisconsin, indicated in the polls, is that the laws against illegal immigration have not been enforced too strictly for the sake of Republican campaign donors. This was done at the expense of the perceived interests of the Trump-voting white rural and small-town white working class, whose wages have been depressed by the poorly-paid illegal immigrant workers from Mexico. Yet if Trump will be perceived as tough enough toward illegal immigration not only on Twitter but also in practice (and he is trying to achieve that), Trump could win Wisconsin again in 2020. He would\u00a0possibly get\u00a0269 out of 538 Electoral College\u00a0votes. Under these circumstances, Donald Trump would be elected president by the House of Representatives, one vote per state, because the Republicans will have a majority among the House members in most states.<\/p>\n

The opinion polling data and other evidence tend to show that the Democrats, or at least Joe Biden, would win in Pennsylvania (and he is, according to the latest poll, the only one who could win in Nevada). Michigan is a probable Democratic win, but less certain. Most opinion polls, including the last two, suggest a Democratic, or at least Joe Biden victory in the state most associated with the auto industry, which was bailed out by the Obama-Biden administration. The exit poll from the presidential elections of 2016 is interesting. Donald Trump won the elections by\u00a02,279,543 votes to Hillary Clinton’s\u00a02,268,839, a difference of 10,704. Yet the exit poll showed that, in a two-way race, Hillary Clinton would have won 48% of the vote and Donald Trump only 44%. It is likely that more people will vote for the lesser of two evils rather than unrealistic choices\u00a0in 2020.<\/p>\n

The electoral turnout, in general, and by state, partisan, ideological and demographic groups, will be essential in determining who will win the election. In 2016, Trump won the Electoral College because a not particularly large, but still large enough, group of people who were not planning to vote at all, in the end, voted for Trump. I expect this to happen again in 2020. Therefore, the opinion polls will underestimate Donald Trump\u2019s support by one point or more in some crucial states.<\/p>\n

Author’s note: I would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Radziszewski, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rider University, for her suggestions.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 6<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>This opinion piece was written by\u00a0Dr. Ionas Aurelian Rus, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College (USA). The opinion does not necessarily represent the opinion of the editorial staff of Moldova.org. *** The conventional wisdom is that the U.S. presidential election of 2020 will be won by the Democratic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":447481,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"content_social_share":"Reading Time: <\/span> 6<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

This opinion piece was written by\u00a0Dr. Ionas Aurelian Rus, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College (USA). The opinion does not necessarily represent the opinion of the editorial staff of Moldova.org.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The conventional wisdom is that the U.S. presidential election of 2020 will be won by the Democratic presidential candidate, most likely Joe Biden. Yet a careful look at the evidence indicates that it is a true toss-up. If Donald Trump will win the election, this will be made possible by his potential victory in Wisconsin, a toss-up state, and one of the three Blue Wall States that the Democrats presumably need to win, together with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I will also discuss some insights from Ohio.<\/p>\n

The most typical “fundamentals” are favoring Trump, for example, prosperity and possibly peace. Yet Trump has also often not been wise or even rational as president, and a majority of the voters indicate that they do not plan to vote for him, and they will not. Yet Trump could win the Electoral College again, just as in 2016, though he will almost certainly lose the popular vote for the second time.<\/p>\n

Any discussion will have to start from the opinion polls for the states that voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 as well as Arizona, which went Republican in the presidential elections since 2000, and where the Democrats won the Congressional elections of 2018. Arizona is seemingly a toss-up, but there is indirect evidence that the appointed Republican Senator Martha McSally is ahead in the polls against the declared Democratic candidate Mark Kelly, the husband of former (Democratic) Representative Gabbie Giffords, who was shot by a gunman. While one could argue that looking at the Senate election polls is not very relevant to the presidential election results, we should not forget that we are in the age of Trump. In Wisconsin in 2016, the Republican Senate incumbent Ron Johnson was ahead of the former long-serving Democratic Senator Russ Feingold in the last two opinion polls. Throughout the country, some individuals have hesitated to indicate that they plan to vote for Trump, but not for other Republican candidates, in the polls.\u00a0 This was also a proxy for a Trump victory, and it led to my correct, but rather late, prediction of a Trump victory in 2016 that I will discuss below.<\/p>\n

At around noon on election day (November 8, 2016), after I voted and went to other polling locations in the Greater Cincinnati area and observed a lower than expected turnout among African-Americans and young people in various places, and talked to a student of Miami University, Ohio, who was asking exit poll questions, I updated my prediction. I had previously thought that there was a 60-67% chance that the presidential elections would be won by Hillary Clinton. Yet I revised my earlier predictions and I predicted correctly on the basis of what I had observed, and the Wisconsin Senate polls discussed above, that Donald Trump would win Wisconsin and the presidency. I told my Introduction to American Politics night students at 6:23 PM ET that Donald Trump would win the presidency. I was right and, as some of my night students told me, rather unique.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump is likely to win in Iowa according to the latest opinion poll even against Joe Biden, just as the Republican senator elected in 2014, Joni Ernst will likely win the Senate race according to the polls. One senses that, notwithstanding the Democratic House of Representatives victories in 2018, Iowa will get into the Republican column for a number of presidential elections. Yet the lack of exit polls for the 2018 elections makes the task of the analyst more difficult. Florida is also Republican-leaning or a toss-up according to the latest opinion polls, after the Republican victories of 2018, and after Obama’s opening to Communist Cuba alienated many Cuban-Americans.<\/p>\n

Ohio, the state in which I live and teach at the University of Cincinnati, is still inherently a toss-up state, notwithstanding various analyses to the contrary. The Republican governor Mike DeWine, elected in 2018, is more popular among the Democrats who had voted against him than was John Kasich, the Republican governor in 2011-2019. This is so partly because he is not in any way anti-union, unlike John Kasich, who had signed into law the union-busting Senate Bill 5 in 2011. The Ohio voters voted in a referendum to repeal it by a margin of 61.59% to 38.41% on November 8, 2011. I believe that a key reason why Obama won Ohio in 2012 was because the Republican Party was seen as the party of union-busting. Yet some of those who had anti-Senate Bill 5 lawn signs in 2011 and pro-Obama signs in 2012, including various cops and firefighters, had pro-Trump signs in 2016. I have identified the following types of individuals who had voted for somebody other than Trump in 2016 who now support Trump and plan to vote for him in 2020: 1. several Gary Johnson Libertarian voters, 2. several Bernie Sanders, then Jill Stein (Green), voters and 3. several Hillary Clinton voters who believe that the Democrats have gone too far to the left after the 2016 elections. In 2016, Hillary Clinton had attracted some ideologically libertarian and even Libertarian Party voters.<\/p>\n

According to the Ohio 2018 exit poll, 6% of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 voters voted for Mike DeWine in 2018. Interestingly enough, 48% of the Ohio voters desired a Democratic-controlled Senate and 47% a Republican-controlled Senate according to the same exit poll, in which 53% indicated that they approved of the job that Trump was doing. Yet the intent of some voters was not to replace but to contain or balance, Trump.<\/p>\n

Another interesting, yet unique, pattern in Ohio is that most voters from union families, and most union voters, voted for Trump in 2016 (54%). In 2018, among the members of union households, 46% declared that they had voted for the Democratic candidate for governor Richard Cordray and 36% for Mike DeWine; 18% did not answer. The latter percentage is huge. I believe that they overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, voted for Mike DeWine, who probably won the union vote. Or at least this was my impression after talking to local\u00a0union members. To be sure, the latest opinion poll from late November 2018 showed that Biden and most other Democratic candidates were performing better than Trump in Ohio. Yet I believe that the state will probably vote for Trump.<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding the Democratic victory in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in November 2018, the evidence from 2019 is not necessarily encouraging for the Democrats in Wisconsin, which will, I believe, be a toss-up state in 2020. The Republican Brian Hagedorn won a statewide election for the Wisconsin Superior Court in April 2019 with 50.2%, and the Democrat Lisa Neubauer lost with 49.8%. While one should not overstate the importance of this Republican victory (or of the latest opinion poll from late April 2019, in which Trump is ahead of Biden by 46-42%, it shows that Wisconsin is clearly\u00a0a toss-up state. Some hints of that appear in the exit poll for the 2018 elections in Wisconsin. The Republican, Tea Party governor\u00a0Scott Walker (2011-2019), who lost the re-election race for governor in November 2018\u00a0by 48.44% to 49.54% against Professor Tony Evers, had the approval of 49% and the disapproval of 48% of those who were polled. Moreover, 47% had a favorable and 48% an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, unlike in the other states that were won by the Democrats in 2018, where more people had a favorable than an unfavorable view of the Democrats. The comparable\u00a0percentages for the Republicans were 47% and 50%. Moreover, only 49% of the exit poll answers indicated a preference for a Democratic-controlled Senate, lower than in other states won by the Democrats; 46% preferred the Republicans.<\/p>\n

About 48% of the Wisconsin voters who answered the November 2018\u00a0exit poll thought that Donald Trump’s immigration policies were too tough, while 16% thought that they were not tough enough and 33% thought that they were about right. By contrast, in all the other states won by the Democrats, more people thought that Trump’s immigration policies were too tough. In retrospect, the problem for the Republicans in Wisconsin, indicated in the polls, is that the laws against illegal immigration have not been enforced too strictly for the sake of Republican campaign donors. This was done at the expense of the perceived interests of the Trump-voting white rural and small-town white working class, whose wages have been depressed by the poorly-paid illegal immigrant workers from Mexico. Yet if Trump will be perceived as tough enough toward illegal immigration not only on Twitter but also in practice (and he is trying to achieve that), Trump could win Wisconsin again in 2020. He would\u00a0possibly get\u00a0269 out of 538 Electoral College\u00a0votes. Under these circumstances, Donald Trump would be elected president by the House of Representatives, one vote per state, because the Republicans will have a majority among the House members in most states.<\/p>\n

The opinion polling data and other evidence tend to show that the Democrats, or at least Joe Biden, would win in Pennsylvania (and he is, according to the latest poll, the only one who could win in Nevada). Michigan is a probable Democratic win, but less certain. Most opinion polls, including the last two, suggest a Democratic, or at least Joe Biden victory in the state most associated with the auto industry, which was bailed out by the Obama-Biden administration. The exit poll from the presidential elections of 2016 is interesting. Donald Trump won the elections by\u00a02,279,543 votes to Hillary Clinton’s\u00a02,268,839, a difference of 10,704. Yet the exit poll showed that, in a two-way race, Hillary Clinton would have won 48% of the vote and Donald Trump only 44%. It is likely that more people will vote for the lesser of two evils rather than unrealistic choices\u00a0in 2020.<\/p>\n

The electoral turnout, in general, and by state, partisan, ideological and demographic groups, will be essential in determining who will win the election. In 2016, Trump won the Electoral College because a not particularly large, but still large enough, group of people who were not planning to vote at all, in the end, voted for Trump. I expect this to happen again in 2020. Therefore, the opinion polls will underestimate Donald Trump\u2019s support by one point or more in some crucial states.<\/p>\n

Author’s note: I would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Radziszewski, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rider University, for her suggestions.<\/p>\n\n

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