Why Trump will (probably) lose, in one word

As a historian and the son of a political scientist, I know one thing: Predictions about the results of an election — any election — are hazardous this far out. There’s still three months to go, and a lot can happen in that time.

That’s my caveat. It’s the reason I put “probably” in parentheses as part of the headline.

Now here’s the meat of the matter.

Trump won’t lose because of COVID-19, although that’s part of it, and he won’t lose because of police brutality and race-baiting, although that’s part of it, too.

He’ll lose for the same reason winners have won in the past.

There’s been a lot of talk that Trump’s supporters are highly motivated, and that’s been true. But this time out, his opponents are likely to be even more highly motivated. And what’s motivating them is the most powerful and reliable motivator of all:

Fear.

How 2020 is different

This isn’t 2016. Democrats weren’t afraid Hillary Clinton would lose; they were sure she wouldn’t, and they were wrong.

The fear of being wrong again plays into the calculus for 2020, but it’s far, far more than that. Trump, through his own actions — threatening de facto martial law, stoking violence, attacking civil liberties, ignoring COVID-19, and even musing about delaying the election — has created so much fear in his opponents that they’re likely to turn out in droves to vote against him.

Not for Biden. Against him.

This is the opposite of what shrewd, ruthless candidates usually do. They don’t create fear of themselves, they create fear of the other candidate.

• Democrats used fear of nuclear war to help elect Lyndon Johnson in a 1964 landslide.

• Republicans used the fear of the Soviet Union to elect Ronald Reagan by arguing that Jimmy Carter had left the U.S. military weak.

• There was the infamous Willie Horton ad for George H.W. Bush that stoked racist fears by accusing Mike Dukakis of being soft on crime.

• George W. Bush got re-elected by playing up the fear of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

But with Trump, it’s worked the other way. He’s creating such palpable fear of what he might do, that people are scared to death he’ll get re-elected. In a normal election year, disaffected followers of Bernie Sanders would still be crying foul at this point, threatening not to vote for the party’s standard-bearer. That’s what they did in 2016, but they’re not doing that now. Because they’re afraid.

Trump himself has done a better job than any political opponent ever could of painting himself as a figure who’s absurd, incompetent, and dangerous all at once.

Trump’s miscalculation

Trump knows all about the persuasive power of fear. He uses it to cow enemies into submission by threatening lawsuits, and to keep Republicans in line by vowing to support a primary opponent if they dare to go against him. He even started running ads in an attempt to reproduce Richard Nixon’s winning “law and order” strategy by casting Joe Biden as someone who would dismantle law enforcement and leave cities vulnerable to rampaging mobs.

It may not have worked, because the campaign stopped airing ads at all while it reassessed how it was spending its money. Part of it might be that Biden himself has a long history of supporting the police. But a bigger factor, I think, is that more voters are scared of Trump than they are of ANYTHING Biden might do. That’s what happens when you shatter norms and it doesn’t work: when your response to a deadly virus is an abject failure by any standard, when the economy is tanking, and when you’re threatening to undermine the very institutions that make the United States what it is.

Yes, Trump will fire up his base with racist fears. But when it comes right down to it, more people are scared of COVID-19 and economic ruin than they are of losing Confederate flags and statues, or of largely peaceful protests. Even when Trump, by his own actions, goads protesters into violence, that violence doesn’t directly touch most people’s lives. The virus and paychecks do.

That’s what causes fear on the other side — the people who aren’t part of his base. And despite minor fluctuations in polling, that other side is consistently quite a bit larger than his supporters. Now, they’re more scared, too, and that doesn’t look good for Trump. He knows he’s in deep doodoo, which is why he’s desperately trying to sell the election as a fraud before any ballots have been cast: He knows he doesn’t have the votes, and he isn’t likely to get them.

The irony is that he’s done it to himself. If he hadn’t created the kind of fear he’s aroused in his opponents, he might well be ahead in the polls right now. But when he’s tried to use fear as a weapon, it’s backfired. He has made the majority of people in this country afraid.

But they’re afraid of him.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Trump will (probably) lose in November. The only thing Trump can probably do to give himself any hope is not to create a fear of Biden, but to reduce the fear of himself. And that’s just not something he seems willing to do, if he’s even capable of it.

Time is running out.

To paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, the thing right now that Trump most has to fear is fear — of him.