This archive report was first published on 4 August 2019.
Trump's Re-election Hinges on a Status Quo Campaign ¶
With the Democratic debates in the spotlight, there has been a lot written about the Democratic Party's ideological evolution and how this might help Donald Trump win re-election. However, this column will focus on Trump's extremism and unpopularity.
Trump in 2020 won't be a change candidate. Instead, he'll be a candidate of the policy status quo, which means he won't be campaigning on what he promised across 2016 or the Paul Ryan agenda that the Republican Congress pushed in his first year.
Instead, Trump's policy argument in 2020 will be to keep doing what we're doing. This includes a deregulatory agenda, a tariff push, and a harsh border policy that are all unpopular. However, it also includes free-spending budgets, easy money, and a more anti-interventionist foreign policy than past Republicans, all of which are relatively popular.
But this isn't the kind of campaign that Trump himself wants to run. He feeds on racialized Twitter feuds, battles over Baltimore and Ilhan Omar, media freak-outs, and 'don't call us racist!' defensiveness. He's as obviously bored by the prospect of a safe, status-quo campaign as he is uninterested in conservative intellectuals trying to transform Trumpism into something intellectually robust.
Consider two data points. First, even if he's forced conservatives to excuse statements they once would have denounced, there's no sign that Trump's rhetoric has generally boosted white America's sense of racial grievance. Instead, polls show that even among Republicans, let alone independents, racial stereotypes have softened under Trump.
Second, in 2016 Trump won many millions of voters who disapproved of him. But in recent 2020 polling, Trump is performing below his job approval rating in many head-to-head matchups, which suggests that voters who would be responsive to the 'policy status quo' argument keep getting turned off by the president's rhetoric.
None of this means that Trump cannot be re-elected. But it means that if he wins again, it will likely be in spite of his own rhetoric, not as the dark fruit of a white-identitarian campaign.
