He can't win unless he steals it, and I don't think he can steal it at this point. It's electoral college math. I expect another attempt to steal Florida, but it's going to be a lot harder this time for demographic reasons.
The ACA is *popular*. I mean, even people who think it's a mess (like me) want it expanded. Trump won't offer that because the Republicans won't let him. (Don't underestimate how much he is manipulated by those around him. It turns out people with narcissistic personality disorder are easy to con.)
It works well to rhetorically attack unpopular things -- not so well to rhetorically attack popular things. Trump can't read a poll and can't tell the difference. He didn't even plan to win the first time (it was all a scheme to promote his brand) -- he succeeded due to the appallingness of the other Republican candidates, and the Democrats nominating the worst candidate in 100 years, and then the electoral college. He has about as much chance of being re-elected as Andrew Johnson.
No, forget Trump -- worry about the Senate.
During the Obama years polls about the ACA all indicated it was unpopular. Very few drilled down to ask why it was unpopular. In the few polls that did, about half the people who did not approve of the ACA didn't think it went far enough. The Republicans found that out the hard way when they tried to repeal it.
Even some of the dimmest Republicans in Congress now understand that trying to get rid of the ACA at this point would be political suicide. The changes the ACA made to the insurance infrastructure in the US are deep enough that there is a chance that completely eliminating the ACA could bring down the entire health insurance sector, or throw it into massive chaos. I doubt the most catastrophic scenarios, but the insurance companies are very nervous about the ACA going away.
I also agree that any Republican is going to face an uphill battle to win the White House in 2020. There are many factors that go against them:
1) The electorate has been getting about 2% less white every presidential election since the early 1980s. Nixon's "Southern Strategy" worked up until 2012 because there were enough whites voting to possibly win the presidency. In 2012 the pundits were saying that a white strategy for Republicans was going to become impossible by 2016, but Trump managed to keep the white turnout similar to 2012, the first presidential election in 30+ years with only a tiny drop in white turnout. This was due to Trump motivating some disaffected white voters to turn out and enough non-white voters being discouraged from voting to make the difference.
2) As you pointed out, Hillary is not going to be on the ticket. She was an epically bad candidate, though probably would have made at least an average president. All the Democrats running this year are better campaigners and more likable.
3) The electoral college map just isn't there.
The chances of Trump (or any Republican) winning any states he lost in 2016 is very low. If Bill Weld were to win the nomination, it would be a very different race, but he's way too liberal to win the nomination. All the battleground states in 2020 will be in states Trump won. A very appealing Republican might be able to pick off New Hampshire or Nevada, but neither of those states are going to go for any Republican the current party would nominate.
The states Trump won that look shaky are:
Lean blue - Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa. All swung heavily blue in the midterms. Just losing two of these would be game over for him.
Toss ups - Arizona, Florida, and possibly North Carolina - Florida has a very corrupt Republican party willing to put their thumb on the scale very heavily, but there are many factors working against them. There has been hand wringing about the GOP trying to do a back door to cripple the initiative allowing ex-felons to vote, but Andrew Gillum said the language of the initiative is clear and the attempts will very likely lose in court. There are also a lot of Puerto Ricans in Florida now and they loath Trump and the Republicans.
Arizona and North Carolina have both seen some big demographic shifts and Democrats have become competitive. Also the Republicans left in Arizona are more often McCain type Republicans than the modern Republicans and they are not interested in more Trump.
Possibly in play - Texas, Montana, and Georgia - Demographic shifts have blued these states too. Republicans remain strong, especially in Texas and Georgia, but a point is coming when there will just be too many people willing to vote Democrat to stop these states from flipping. Montana has had a lot of people move there from California and is liberalizing. After the next census Montana may get a second congressional district and it will be because more liberal coasters have moved in. Montana Republicans are also more like Arizona Republicans than the Southern and Appalachian Republicans.
Trump and the Republicans can afford to lose 1, maybe 2 small states, but losing 1 larger state would be game over.
The Senate is the toughest thing for the Democrats. Their chances of winning a slim majority in 2020 is decent. But their odds of winning in a lot of red states would only happen in a wave election bigger than 2018. A wave election is possible and probably the best thing for the country. There needs to be a large scale demonstration that Trump style Republicanism is not going to be tolerated. That would send the Republicans back to the drawing board to try and rethink their brand. It might also rip apart the party.
Seeing the Republicans as we know them today go the way of other extremist political movements would be a very good thing for both the country and the world.
Indeed.
Then they are climate change deniers with no understanding of basic physics or the economics of renewables. "Killing certain types of energy" will not kill the economy, in fact the opposite.
Attempting to change the energy economy too quickly without the alternatives firmly in place could lead to chaos. Energy is deeply rooted in not just the world economy, but it literally holds the US dollar up because it's the world benchmark currency for crude oil. If oil became a minor commodity, it's unknown what would happen to the US dollar. It could go into free fall and we could see hyper inflation.
However, it's also imperative we move away from oil as quickly as we can without causing chaos. Climate issue aside, there are a lot of other reasons to do it. Burning oil reduces air quality and contributes to a lot of health problems and while we're not running out of oil, we are running out of cheap oil. The stuff left to develop is very expensive, and in some cases very risky to develop. Much of the oil being produced today is heavy oil that requires more refining to make into gasoline which is both more expensive and more energy waste.
If we don't move away from oil as much as possible the world economy faces collapse when the costs to develop the remaining oil get too high.
But economically it's a bit of a tightrope to navigate the switch away from oil without crashing the dollar.
According to Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, the writers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and basically everyone involved in creating the US system of government, YES A SITTING PRESIDENT CAN BE INDICTED JUST LIKE ANYONE ELSE.
No man is above the law.
Who are you to think you know better than the Founding Fathers about the very system of government they created?
Your claim is that the President is a King; you claim that he can murder people and cannot be indicted.
Your attitude seems pretty un-American to me. Perhaps you'd prefer North Korea, where that's actually how the legal system works, and their "President" is also considered a God-King? Trump seems to prefer North Korea (and no wonder). Why don't you move there? Seems like that's where you want to be living.
Meanwhile, here in the US legal system, when a man sets up a fake charity, then steals money from it for his own personal self-aggrandisement, and we have absolute proof of this beyond the shadow of a doubt (which we do), we indict him. Regardless of what office he's occupying.
There are two types of rule/legal system philosophies. It's what my SO calls the Army vs the Navy system. A friend of ours who is retired Navy first observed this difference between the two services. In the Army, if there is not a regulation saying you can do something, it is not allowed. In the Navy it's the opposite, if the regulations are silent, you can do it. This is in part because of the nature of the services. More often in the Navy a commander might find themselves in a situation where they need to make a decision without input from above, so they need the leeway to act independently. In the Army commanders are only rarely out of contact with higher authorities and it's usually in a situation that is going to end badly very quickly.
Legal systems of the states and the federal government are also a mixed bag based on their constitution. For example Oregon is a restrictive state, if the law is silent, you can't do it, whereas Washington is a permissive state where you can do it if the law is silent. A few years ago there was quite a bit of consternation that Washington was a destination place for bestiality fans because there were no laws against it on the books in Washington so it was legal. When a guy got killed by a horse in the act, the legislature fairly quickly passed a law against it.
The US constitution is a permissive document. If US law is silent about something, it's allowed. The constitution does lay out some restrictions on legal exposure for some government offices, but is silent about the president being indictable. Most legal scholars who understand the Constitution believe that because it's quiet on the subject, it should be doable.
The only thing the president can't be indicted camp has to stand on is just a memo written by Robert Bork's office when there was a debate about indicting Spiro Agnew. It has never been decided in court or any law passed about it. Mueller is enough of a traditionalist he's not going to rock any boat, but I would not be surprised if some prosecutor somewhere won't try it on Trump and it will end up in the courts.
Roberts does not like to reverse the court, and there is the Clinton decision that a lawsuit could go forward, so I suspect he would vote to allow the president to be indicted in office. Roberts also sees the existential threat Trump poses to the country and realizes that the votes aren't there in the Senate to convict in an impeachment.
Both my SO and I have the feeling Barr is deliberately stalling. Quite possibly he's waiting for some indictments to come through before releasing the report to Congress. I've had the feeling from the start that Barr has been manipulating Trump to make Trump think he's on his side, but he is really working against him.
When Trump figures out he's been conned by Barr, he's going to be incandescent. Barr is playing to time to get something lined up before that happens. It may be that a number of indictments of key players in the White House are being lined up, or it could mean that some of the corrupt Republicans in Congress are going to be indicted, or both, or something else. Something big is happening under the surface.
