Way Early Thoughts on the 2020 Presidential Election Climate

I just posted this on Facebook in response to a thread about McConnell deliberately picking on Warren to make her the face of the Democratic Party because McConnell thinks she'd be easy to beat as a presidential nominee in 2020:

Depends what Putin and the FBI concoct against Warren (or anyone else). According to 538 and at least one other study, the two Comey letters alone likely cost Hillary about 2% of the vote and gave Trump an extra 2%. (the effect was about 3/4 of that in the three close "Rust Belt" states). *If* you believe that, Hillary's 65.9 mil -62.9 mil vote lead and fairly narrow electoral vote loss become a popular vote win near the Obama-McCain landslide and she wins the electoral vote comfortably. So, structurally, the picture isn't as bad as 11/8 made it look. Of course, Putin is continuing to try to pull stuff in other elections, and he'll likely give it another go in 2020. And the FBI and much of the rest of the intelligence community will be essentially in Trump's hands. So who knows?

In the Democrats' favor in 2020 is that it seems that voters seem to be able to assign blame when the incumbent party screws up (Bush-McCain) in 2008 more than giving credit when it does well (Clinton-Gore in 2000 and Obama-HRC in 2016). We didn't go from the 2008 landslide to the 2016 loss overnight. Obama's popular vote victory in 2012 was about 60% of what it was in 2008, despite McCain at least being viewed as a war hero and Romney being an empty suit, and Obama having turned things around a bit by November 2012. HRC won the popular vote by a margin about 60% of Obama's 2012 one. I think it's largely because the Bush disaster was so apparent in 2008 that it pushed most of the "swing voters" to go hard away from the Republicans. By 2016 it was really a memory and voters went back to their tribal corners. If the first few weeks of the Trump administration and the Republicans having total control of the government are any indication, and the unprecedented low polling this early for Trump are an omen of things to come, the climate for Democrats in 2020 will be more favorable than in 2016.

Of course, more voter suppression laws could come into play.

Anyway, I'm not SO optimistic, but my point is that who we pick as our candidate is probably less relevant than a lot of other factors. Besides, people seem to like Warren (of course, they liked HRC a lot the race actually started).