Trump’s voters in 2016 were also older relative to his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meaning some will no longer be alive, based on life expectancy predictions. Younger first-time voters are more likely to vote for the Democrat, Luntz said.
Last year’s congressional elections, which gave control of the House of Representatives to Democrats, point to surging enthusiasm among Democratic-leaning voters. Overall turnout in 2018 was the highest for a midterm election in the four decades that the U.S. Census has collected the data, at 53% of the voting age population. That was an 11 percentage-point increase from 2014, according to an April 2019 Census report.
Right Direction
Trump advisers say they aren’t focused too much on head-to-head polling at this stage. Many of the Democratic candidates remain relatively unknown to the broader electorate -- and thus susceptible to efforts by Trump’s campaign to define them in negative terms. Trump’s advisers say they also aren’t overly concerned about his approval rating, which was historically low even when he won election -- suggesting Americans will vote for him even if they don’t like him personally.
“Any poll number now is pretty useless -- this is still a referendum, this is Donald Trump against a fictitious candidate,” said David Urban, a senior adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign who remains close to the president. “When we get a nominee is when I’ll start paying attention to the numbers. When they have a president and a vice presidential candidate, then we can start talking.”
A key number Trump’s team do watch is the percentage of Americans who regard the country as headed in the right direction. That metric has improved since 2016 but hasn’t exceeded 40 percent in Trump’s presidency, according to both Gallup and CBS News.
His advisers are particularly focused on four states where they believe the election will turn: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Trump only won the Electoral College in 2016 after carrying Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a combined margin of about 77,000 votes out of 13.3 million cast in the three states.
Campaign advisers are confident Trump will hold onto Ohio and Florida, healthy stores of Electoral College votes that turned rightward in the last two elections.
“Anyone who thinks this is going to be a blow-out in one direction or another is really just mistaken,” Urban said. “This isn’t even about the popular vote; it is about the votes in a handful of states in the electoral college.”
This story provided by Bloomberg News.