We have all become used to very boring presidential re-election campaigns. Bill Clinton in 1996 won easily; George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012 made it close enough to induce some mild suspense, but not all that much, really. None of them had even a hint of a challenge for their re-nominations.
That's not going to be the case for Donald Trump, at least barring some extremely unlikely reversal.
In fact, the reporting over the weekend about early stirrings among potential Republican candidates for 2020 only confirmed what's obvious: Unpopular presidents get nomination challenges. Here's the history:
In 1992, journalist and former White House aide Pat Buchanan challenged George H.W. Bush. Had Bush remained popular, it's likely Buchanan's run would have been ignored and forgotten (just as two members of the House who entered primaries against Richard Nixon in 1972 were ignored and forgotten). But a recession drove Bush's approval ratings down sharply in late 1991 and early 1992 _ he fell under 40 percent by the end of February according to FiveThirtyEight's historical estimates, and stayed there or lower most of the rest of the year. Buchanan never managed to win even a single primary; his best showing was his first, with 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. But he was able to compete throughout the primary season, and wound up taking about a quarter of all votes in Republican primaries, enough to force Bush to pay attention.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter was challenged by Senator Ted Kennedy. Carter had dropped to around 40 percent approval as early as his second year in office, and after the 1978 midterms his numbers went south again, reaching a low of around 28 percent in mid-1979. Carter did recover temporarily in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis, which (along with some lethargic early campaigning from Kennedy and loyalty from some key Democratic-aligned interest groups) allowed Carter to survive until the general election. However, Kennedy made it close: He won 12 states, 38 percent of the overall vote, and eventually held Carter to only 64 percent of the delegates at the Democratic convention. A third serious candidate, California Governor Jerry Brown, also ran in the primaries, but failed to gain any traction.
And in 1976, Gerald Ford, who had been selected for the vice-presidency after Spiro Agnew resigned and then moved up the presidency when Nixon resigned, almost lost the nomination to Ronald Reagan. Ford is the only new president in the polling age to have numbers similar to Trump's; Ford's numbers are a bit better, but they are also much closer to the next presidential election. (Ford took office in August 1974, giving him only about 18 months before the presidential primaries began.) Reagan won 24 states and 46 percent of the primary election vote _ and a bit over 47 percent of the delegate vote at the convention. Granted, Ford would have been a weak nomination candidate even if he was popular because he had never been nominated nationally for anything to begin with, but it's likely he would have beaten back the Reagan challenge a lot better had he been at, say, 55 percent approval.
By way of contrast, the five presidents in the modern nomination era who did not receive serious primary challenges had very different popularity profiles. Nixon's first-term approval bottomed out at 48 percent. Reagan fell steadily in 1982 and reached a low of 35 percent early in 1983, but he rebounded steadily, passing 40 percent by spring and continuing to improve after that. Bill Clinton's worst numbers were in his very first spring in the White House, but after mid-1993 he never fell below 40 percent. And neither George W. Bush or Barack Obama fell below 40 percent approval at any point in their first terms.
With Trump now solidly below 40 percent approval (FiveThirtyEight has him at 36.4 right now, and he's been below 40 percent for almost three months), it's no surprise that ambitious Republicans no longer see 2020 as a closed-off option. And that's not to mention the possibility that the Robert Mueller investigation could turn even more serious. The "invisible primary" portion of presidential nomination fights normally starts this early, so anyone even thinking about 2020 needs to start getting his or her name out there and begin the preliminary steps towards organizing a campaign. Waiting another two years could mean waiting until it's too late.
It is way too early to guess exactly how vulnerable Trump is to actually losing the nomination.
It is not too early, however, to speculate about effects of a primary challenge, because those effects begin right now.
Among recent presidents, Trump has been the least attached to his party. But the reality of a nomination challenge, even when the Iowa caucuses are still over two years away, will be a strong force pushing him to stick with the party. Exactly how that plays out depends on exactly how challenges unfold, but, for example, Jimmy Carter in 1979 rolled out a strong health-care reform proposal as part of his efforts to compete with Ted Kennedy for liberal Democrats, and George H.W. Bush probably was constrained in 1992 from staking out moderate ground (where swing voters he would need in November were located) by the need to fight off Buchanan.
And Republican actors may well support challenges, at least quietly, as part of an effort to keep Trump focused on party priorities.
All of that will mean that any effort Trump might (finally) make to appeal to anyone outside of his strongest supporters might be entirely off the table for now. It's possible that in the current era, with far more partisan polarization than in 1976 or 1980, a first-term president as wounded as Trump might wind up in a truly impossible situation in which efforts to rally weak supporters to him _ and therefore to move his approval ratings back into the mid-40s _ would also drive away weak opponents and make it even harder for him to get to 50 percent approval.
Bottom line? We've never had a president begin his term with similar approval numbers during the polling age, so it's hard to know exactly what Trump is in for. But it would be very surprising if numbers this bad did not produce a nomination challenge.
