True Refuge wrote:Nakena wrote:Trump won 2016 with a trash campaign. Bloomberg didn win anything despite he blasted hundreds of millions.
He'll likely win 2020 with an even trashier one. The downward spiral continues.
To me, the difference between two bad nominees will come down to the economy. Does it or does it not crash.
That the immediate cause of a crash might be a disease outbreak does not make the crash itself a natural disaster. People are accustomed to the idea that the economy is beyond human understanding (and the prognostications of economists, right no more than half the time, do not dispel this idea). Causes matter less than they do with response to natural disasters, rightness or wrongness of wars, closedness or openness of borders, any issue besides the economy. A good economy gets you re-elected, a bad one can lose re-election.
Though I also believe in the pendulum. Nate Silver doesn't, so I've been cautious to mention it, but I think at this time with Democrats getting their hopes up, it's important to bear in mind that Presidents after one term almost never lose their re-election. When they do it's an extraordinary circumstance like Carter being too left for a quite leftist Democratic Congress, or GHW Bush having already beaten the pendulum the other way (and Ross Perot). Simply having a bad President (and bear in mind that history finds Carter not so bad), or a good challenger, is not enough for the challenger to beat the pendulum. It's no better or worse with a terrible President and mediocre challenger. Incumbent advantage, in the term limited Presidency, is a hell of a thing.
A really bad recession, begun already, would probably be enough to see Generic President out of office. Why? Timing mostly, plus it's been an unusually long time since a technical recession, and the last one which was terrible has created fear and trauma which would be relived. Double that up with Trump being historically unpopular, worse in most ways than Generic President, and there could be a change of office against the pendulum. No recession though? Four more years of Trump.