Opinion: The 2020 race is on — between the commentariat and the modelers
President Trump outside the White House on Friday. By Megan McArdle Megan McArdle Columnist Bio Follow Columnist March 22 at 12:25 PM We in the political commentariat tend to like complex and nuanced campaign narratives. We pore over the details of the policy prescriptions, hunt for subtle trends in national sentiment and analyze how this remark or that alliance will affect a candidate’s chances with America’s amazing variety of demographic constituencies.
The fact that some of these models perform pretty well has not discouraged the commentariat from pursuing its hobby. And now, with President Trump, we who tell stories about the electorate may have an opportunity to beat the abstract indicators. You can protest that presidents don’t make the economy grow, and you’d be right. Presidents can play ham-fisted havoc with the economy, but they have a negligible ability to deliver upside surprises. Yet it’s obvious that voters think they can, which means that any incumbent whose first term happens to coincide with a boom goes into a reelection campaign is heavily favored.
It seems possible that the models predicting Trump’s reelection, however well they’ve worked in the past, may contain a hidden assumption: a normal sort of president who will not repel swing voters with intemperate vulgarities or disappoint the base by not really pursuing a policy agenda. Which means narrative may beat predictive numbers in the next election.
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