Trump’s Re-election Chances

President Trump’s chances of re-election in 2020 depend on one choice that Democrats will make that year: choosing or not choosing Joe Biden as the Democrat Party’s candidate for President of the United States.

And much will depend on voters in Pennsylvania.

City Journal’s assistant editor, Charles F. McElwee, reveals important data about Pennsylvania in an essay titled “Biden’s Key: Pennsylvania.”

This morning I read McElwee’s essay with interest because I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that has been a one-Party dominated city longer than Finland was subservient to the Soviet Union.

In 1960-1964 as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, I worked for the Allegheny County Republican Party during the Nixon/Kennedy contest for President and for Barry Goldwater in 1964. During that time I learned about “walking around money” and how that was used to pay registered Democrats to vote paper ballots marked up for Republican candidates, how to bribe union leaders and, even that long ago, with very few exceptions I understood that corporate executives with Fortune 500 companies had no political philosophy–they went along to get along.

If Joe Biden is the nominee in 2020–even given signs of ravages of old age–he will win Pennsylvania and all the states that put Donald Trump over the top in 2016.

However, the large number of Democrat Party aspirants for the 2020 nomination contain many who will assure Trump’s re-election. They include twenty of these twenty-one declared candidates.

If McElwee is right, only Biden can win.