Moody's analytics predicts Trump will win in all three scenarios

[regnaD kciN]

59. The notion of an "easy win"...

...doesn’t seem to square with trailing virtually every major Democratic rival in polls as late as just about a year before the election – a result that has held true for pretty much the entire time such polls have been taken. This contrasts with virtually every such election since, yes, 1980 (2016 and possibly 1988 being the exceptions), where it was pretty clear by this time which party was the favorite to win.

Can Trump get re-elected? It’s certainly possible. And I’ll go further and say that, if a generic standard Republican – say, someone like Jeb! – was in the Oval Office, he’d be a strong favorite to win based on the economic results. But the fact that Trump has an underwater approval rating and is trailing his major rivals in the polls despite the economic news should point to one thing: Trump is a one-off in the political world. You often hear the phrase “this is not normal,” and I think that is the overriding factor here. The main factor in 2020 seems, so far, to be the sense that Trump is an aberration. Whether a majority of voters decides he’s an aberration in a positive (“He tells it like it is!”) or negative (“He’s a cancer that needs to be cut out of the body politic.”) sense is what will drive next November’s results. So, while it would be foolish of us to assume a Democratic victory at this point, I don’t think anyone should assume that the old rules in electoral prognostication apply this time, either. Because Trump is a politician who prides himself on “breaking the mold”…and, for better or for worse, broken molds don’t folllow the rules.