Liberal filmmaker Michael Moore says he believes President Donald Trump will win re-election in 2020—and there’s good reason to listen to his predictions.
Speaking with Fast Company, Moore says the states Trump won in the 2016 election are still largely on his side. “I should say re-appointed because we will have an even larger population that will vote against him in 2020,” Moore said. “But he will win those electoral states as it stands now.”
Moore was one of the few prominent people to publicly predict that Trump would both win the 2016 Republican presidential primary and beat Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton in the general election.
Trump won the election with 306 electoral votes to Clinton’s 232, thanks in part to surprise wins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Moore’s home state of Michigan. The Clinton campaign’s decision to largely ignore these states—which went for Trump with a combined total of fewer than 78,000 votes—is widely seen as the primary reason she lost. However, overall, Clinton won the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes—a fact that gives Moore hope.
“Here’s the good news: We don’t have to convince a single Trump voter to vote differently because we already have the majority,” Moore told the magazine.
Moore’s prediction for a second Trump term clashes with the deluge of scandal and precipitous drops in approval ratings that have defined the president’s first seven months in office.
Nationally, Trump’s average approval rating sits between 38.6 percent and 36.9 percent. This roughly mirrors the president’s support in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where Trump’s approval rating is in the mid-30s, according to a recent poll.
To avoid a second Trump term, Moore is urging states to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, under which states will award all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. (States generally award electoral votes based on state-wide vote counts.) So far, 10 states and Washington, D.C., have passed legislation agreeing to the compact. However, the agreement does not go into effect until states with electoral votes totalling 270 or more have joined the effort—and it’s still 105 electoral votes shy. Still, Moore says this is a better path forward than attempting to eliminate the Electoral College altogether.
“That’ll be an easier way to get this done,” Moore said. “People should not despair, thinking, well, the Republicans have all this power and all that. Think of the suffragettes. They were trying to get the vote for women. They got [the 19th Amendment ratified] in 35 states to give women the right to vote. Think of that uphill battle.”