According to this article, the president has an increasingly good chance of winning the electoral college -- from which no one has ever graduated, given that there are no professors, students or courses -- while getting absolutely whacked in the national popular vote.
Longtime readers of this blog will note that you read this prediction here more than a year ago.
President Trump, very roughly, has a one-third chance of winning the currently irrelevant national popular vote and a two-thirds chance of winning the electoral vote.
Given the likely turnout and the ceiling on his popularity (or continuing unpopularity among most voters), he will lose the national vote by somewhere between four and eight million.
The reason is that he has chosen to govern in nearly scientific congruence with his 2016 electoral result. He never saw any reason to move to the middle. His view from day one of his presidency was clear: as long as the national vote doesn't matter --as long as the views of most Americans are irrelevant -- then the key to re-election was to mirror the preferences of the swing state voters, even though these would be quite a bit different than the wishes of most people and especially inconsistent with the desired future of young people.
Trump has no self-evident reason to care much about young people. At his age, it is unreasonable to think that millennials will have a meaningful share of the nation's wealth in his lifetime. Indeed, actuarially speaking, he is not likely to know how high global warming will drive the waves against Manhattan. From an electoral perspective he has even less reason to pay attention to the younger voters. They are not determinative of the outcome in Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which are the three key steps toward his 270 electors.
The question, however, is this: wouldn't his party be better off if its leader tried to win the national popular vote?
p.s.
If Mayor Bloomberg had taken what's he's already spent on advertising his own presidential campaign and funded ballot measures to give voters a chance to choose the national winner, then such measures might already have succeeded in enough states to make it necessary for the president to win the national vote. Maybe political reporters could ask him why he didn't do that, or even if he knows this was a possibility.
p.p.s.
If I had a billion or two billion, not to mention 57 billion, dollars, I'd fund the ballot and legislative campaigns that would make America a real democracy. What a legacy that would be! But what am I talking about? It would take only about $50 million. Too rich for me but pretty cheap for those who have dined out on the big run-up in equity values over the last decade.