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Commentary By Jason L. Riley

The Democrats Could Re-Elect Trump in 2020

Culture Culture & Society

On the campaign trail he’ll say they’ve been out to get him from his first day in office. He won’t be wrong.

Rep. Adam Schiff, who prides himself on being one of President Trump’s leading Democratic tormentors, argued last week that the president must be impeached pronto so that he doesn’t “cheat in one more election.” I know Democrats are eager to expand the scope of impeachable behavior, but since when do we impeach presidents based on what they might do in the future?

Mr. Schiff ought to reacquaint himself with special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony before Congress earlier this year. Mr. Mueller stated that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” But Democrats who are panicking over the prospect of Mr. Trump’s winning a second term should be at least as concerned with the mainstream media’s behavior as they are with Russia’s.

Mr. Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 came as a surprise to so many people because journalists consistently played down his chances of winning. Thinking Mrs. Clinton was a shoo-in, many Democrats stayed home on Election Day. Much has been written about the millions of voters who switched from supporting Barack Obama to backing Mr. Trump in important battleground states like Iowa and Wisconsin. But Democratic nonvoters, who either couldn’t stomach pulling the lever for Mrs. Clinton or didn’t think she needed their support to prevail—were also a decisive factor. In Michigan, for example, Mrs. Clinton received 300,000 fewer votes than Mr. Obama did in 2012, and Mr. Trump won the state by just 11,000 votes.

The media continues to harp on Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, which is news but needs context and is hardly a reason for Democrats to be complacent. Despite low unemployment, rising wages and relatively strong economic growth, the president’s job-approval rating has remained in the 40s. This could be a problem for the incumbent next year, particularly if the economy goes into recession, but it’s not an insurmountable obstacle. President Obama was also polling in the low to mid-40s in December 2011 and went on to be re-elected in 2012.

The press is also inadvertently helping Mr. Trump by giving the most favorable coverage to the most liberal Democratic candidates running to replace him. The president’s strategy has been to paint the other party as too extreme to trust with the White House. Joe Biden has led the Democratic nomination race in national polling from the moment he announced his candidacy. But he is not the preferred candidate of the Washington media elites, as their coverage of him thus far makes clear. Progressive proposals to end private health insurance and decriminalize illegal immigration get far more and far better press coverage than Mr. Biden’s alternatives. If the Democrats do go ahead and nominate a progressive who loses to Mr. Trump, the media can share the blame.

As Mr. Schiff’s remark suggests, many Democrats in Congress have never accepted Mr. Trump as a legitimate president. Speaker Nancy Pelosi understood that the case for impeachment was weak, overly partisan and doomed to fail in the Senate. She moved ahead anyway to placate the progressives in her caucus who share Mr. Schiff’s sentiment. And she now wants it over as soon as possible to placate more-moderate Democrats from districts Mr. Trump carried, who want to spend next year campaigning on other issues.

The irony for Democrats is that fallout from their overzealous get-Trump offensive could strengthen the president’s argument for a second term. He is a disrupter, if nothing else, and after the revelations contained in the Justice Department inspector general’s report, who can argue that some disruption wasn’t in order? “At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the government’s secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American soil,” wrote Charlie Savage in the New York Times. “And what the report showed was not pretty.”

What the report showed was that FBI officials deceived a court into obtaining warrants to wiretap Carter Page, a U.S. citizen and former Trump adviser, during the 2016 campaign. It also showed that a discredited “dossier” compiled at the request of Democratic operatives was “central and essential” to the FBI’s warrant application, something the anti-Trump media had long disputed. In a hapless effort to demonstrate that Mr. Page was working for the Russians, the agency manipulated documents and hid information that could have exonerated him.

Democrats are playing down these findings because, however badly the FBI behaved, it was in the service of taking down Mr. Trump. But voters might see things differently, and I don’t suspect that the president will stop talking about how his opponents in the government and the media have spent the past three years using lies and deception to portray him as a White House squatter.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal