THERE ARE REASONS TO WORRY ABOUT 2020

I think Paul Campos is right:

Trump has a very good chance of getting re-elected, by which I mean the probability of that happening is high enough that it should be considered its own independent ongoing crisis, that should be a non-stop focus of efforts to stop it from happening.

As Campos notes, "Since the days of Grover Cleveland, only once has a party won the White House and not held it for at least eight years" (the Democrats lost the 1980 election after barely winning the 1976 election). That's a reminder that even if Trump is driven from office, a substitute GOP nominee could very well win.

Campos adds:

... I’ll make a bold prediction: It will turn out that, miraculously, Democrats will nominate [a] “flawed” candidate in 2020....

This candidate will turn out to have said and done things that raise “troubling questions” in the minds, loosely speaking, of the elite media in general and the pundit class in particular, because of the iron rule of American politics that Both Sides Do It and the Truth No Doubt Lies Somewhere in the Middle.

When it’s pointed out that these “scandals” add up in seriousness to .1% of whatever happened in the Trump administration yesterday afternoon, the Village Elders will reply that this only emphasizes that the difference between Trump and the Flawed Democrat is one of degree, not kind.

Also, Flawed Democrat will have a lot of trouble connecting with voters, meaning older white people in deep red states. This failure will be attributed to Flawed Democrat’s taste in food, music, and/or couture. (If Flawed Democrat is a woman, her hair will come under extreme scrutiny, because that’s only fair given the media’s unfair tendency to occasionally mention the fact that Trump appears to have a recently deceased marmot on top of his head, so this is Totally Not Sexist.)

I'll go further: If the next Democratic nominee is a woman, she's likely to be a woman who doesn't act "nice," meaning she'll be someone who doesn't smile all the time and who sometimes says things that make people (i.e., GOP voters and older white male pundits) uncomfortable. Political leaders are supposed to act serious and sometimes say uncomfortable things -- but Democratic women are deemed uniquely unnatural when they act that way. Warren, Gillibrand, Harris -- the boys on the bus aren't going to like any of them.

Also, the nominee, whether male or female, is likely to be too far to the left for the pundit class -- definitely too far left on economics (in discussing economics, pundits believe it's always 1992), and probably too left-wing on social issues (the same people who are now singing the praises of the Parkland kids will get the vapors if the 2020 Democratic nominee backs any aspect of the kids' agenda -- what will old men in rural Pennsylvania diners think?).

And then there's this, which I think extends to pretty much any Democratic nominee:

If you think re-litigating 2016 is bad, wait until Bernie wins the 2020 nomination but then Trump gets reelected with 40 percent of the vote because of a John Kasich vanity campaign.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 23, 2018

I feel good about this year's state and local elections. I feel good about the congressional midterms. Winning the 2020 presidential election is going to be the hardest lift.