A little more than a year and a half before the presidential
election of 2020, the post-Mueller features of that contest are coming into
focus along with some clues to its possible outcome. One conclusion to which
the data points is that a relatively small body of voters, with Catholics very
much among them, may be crucial to the outcome.
Above all, next year’s voting will be a referendum on President
Donald Trump. And here it appears that some basic numbers are largely in place
already. Major changes are unlikely in the next 18 months, assuming (which of
course can’t be safely assumed) that neither the report by special counsel
Robert Mueller nor much of anything else alters the views of voters whose minds
are already made up.
To illustrate that, Washington Post
columnist Charles Lane points out that as of April 1, 2017, Trump’s approval
rating stood at 41.5 percent with 52.5 percent disapproving. Then came two
years that featured a tidal wave of events — the firing of FBI director James
Comey, the Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee (now justice) Brett
Kavanaugh, a 35-day shutdown of major portions of the federal government, and
much else.
And after all that … as of April 1 this year, Trump’s approval
rating stood at 42.3 percent with 52.8 percent disapproving. Practically speaking, that is to
say, there had been no change.
From this Lane drew the conclusion — open to challenge in light
of the Mueller report, to be sure, but reasonable just the same — that
“Americans have made up their minds about Trump, and nothing between now and
Election Day — not actual events, and certainly not the spin that his political
opponents put on those events — is likely to change that.”
But will Mueller’s handiwork be a game changer? In fact, it will
be a while before we know. Pending that, it appears that the result in November
2020 will depend on which party does the better job turning out its base. For
Democrats, it also means extending the party’s 2016 edge in the popular vote
into battleground states like Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin
while avoiding scaring off moderate voters by swinging left to please activists
in the primaries. For Trump, it means holding on especially to evangelical Protestants,
something he seems likely to do considering that his approval rating among
members of that group stood at nearly seven in 10 early this year.
Catholic voters are harder to read. Exit polls back to 2004 show
a majority not only supporting the winners of presidential elections but
usually doing that by nearly the same margin as the electorate as a whole. The
2016 election was a slight exception, with Catholics again backing the winner,
Trump, but giving him a larger share of their votes than the total body of
voters (52 percent as against 46.1 percent).
Among white non-Hispanic Catholics, moreover, six out of 10 voted
for Trump. Whether that group stands with him next year may well determine the
outcome of the election.
That in turn may help explain why Trump and Vice President Mike
Pence have placed so much emphasis lately on condemning proposals allowing
late-term abortion — embraced by the Democratic governor of New York and
adopted there, similarly embraced by the Democratic governor of Virginia but
set aside in that state. Whoever the Democrats choose to represent them in
2020, the candidate will have to decide whether it would be smart to go into
another close presidential election with that particular albatross around his
or her neck.
Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and
author of American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall,
and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America (Ignatius Press).