No matter how unpopular Donald Trump is (approval rating at last check a mere 42 percent), there’s many a pundit predicting the Electoral College will come through for him and his re-election hopes come Election Day 2020.
But a new Civiqs poll finds Trump may need to pump his brakes.
According to New York magazine, Civiqs’ state-by-state polling of registered voters shows Trump in trouble in all 50 states.
Per the magazine:
Civiqs shows the president’s net approval ratios being underwater (i.e., negative) in 10 states he carried in 2016: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. If that were to represent how the 2020 elections turn out, Trump would have a booming 119 electoral votes. And it’s not as though he’s on a knife’s edge between victory and defeat in all these Trump 2016 states where he’s doing poorly: He’s underwater by 12 points in Pennsylvania, 11 in Michigan, and nine in Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. And there’s virtually no indication that states that narrowly went for [Hillary] Clinton in 2016 are trending in Trump’s direction: His approval ratios are minus 18 in Colorado, minus 15 in Minnesota, minus 12 in Nevada, and minus 27 in New Hampshire. These are, by the way, polls of registered voters, not just “adults,” so they should be a relatively sound reflection of the views of the electorate.
The news site notes other recent polling citing similar negative numbers for the occupant of the Oval Office.
Logically, the polling numbers make sense. Since taking office, Trump has started trade wars, feuded with financial regulators, and stanned for dictators—in addition to outright demonizing immigrants, Mexicans and other people of color, including four sitting members of Congress.
And did anyone notice the tanking of markets Wednesday, inspiring the Twitter hashtag #TrumpRecession?
But as Trump himself boasted at the start of his first campaign for office, he could “shoot somebody” on New York’s Fifth Avenue and still get elected.
So, as New York magazine notes, the fear that some Democrats have of Trump pulling a win out his ass of thin air remains real.
But as every good Spades player knows, “running a Boston,” or winning every book possible in the card game, is a high hurdle.
Based on this latest polling, it may be just as high a hurdle for Trump to get the majority 270 electoral votes he would need to win re-election.