Endlessly Donald Trump jabbered at his potential Democratic opponents in 2020, decked out with contemptuous nicknames. According to him, his re-election will only be a formality. He approaches, it is true, the presidential year with several advantages.
The first relates to the observation: the last outgoing presidents who have tried to obtain a second mandate have almost always succeeded, as the examples of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton show. George H. W. Bush did not succeed, but he succeeded an eight-year Republican in the White House, Ronald Reagan, of which he was vice-president.
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Jimmy Carter had been struck down, for his part, by a "perfect storm": an economic slump caused by the second oil shock and a major diplomatic crisis, with the taking hostage for more than a year of fifty-two members of the Embassy of the United States in Tehran, in the midst of the Islamic Revolution.
A thriving economy
None of the elements of this “storm” are currently clouding the horizon of the billionaire elected to everyone's surprise in 2016. The American economy remained flourishing throughout 2019, as evidenced by the unemployment rate remained at historically low levels. And Wall Street, which has a large portion of pensions tied to it, will end the year once again at a higher level than it started.
According to forecasts by the rating agency Moody's, keeping the economy at 2019 levels would be a virtual guarantee of re-election.
Certainly, the tensions created by the trade wars launched by Donald Trump, first with China, have started to weigh on household morale, as evidenced by the University of Michigan index, but at the margins. Consumption remains the most solid engine of US growth, while the manufacturing sector is in sharp decline, especially in key presidential states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.
According to forecasts by the rating agency Moody's, keeping the economy at 2019 levels would be a virtual guarantee of re-election. The agency's three models all give the re-elected billionaire with a margin higher than that of 2016, in number of large voters, in two out of three scenarios.
According to Moody's, Donald Trump would indeed be able to add to all the states won in his election Minnesota and New Hampshire. These presidential forecasts by Moody's, launched in the 1980s, have always been validated by the results of the elections with one notable exception, that which had seen Donald Trump's victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, then a winner.
