An academic pollster explains why she thinks any Democratic nominee will win the presidency in 2020

Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist at Christopher Newport University's Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy has developed a US election prediction model that performed very well in the 2018 midterms; she has since refined it based on the results of the election and she says can predict elections a long way off, regardless of who the nominee is.

Based on that model, she believes that Trump will lose the presidency in 2020, "barring a shock to the system"; which she attributes to a likely shift in midwestern voting, because "the complacent electorate of 2016, who were convinced Trump would never be president, has been replaced with the terrified electorate of 2020, who are convinced hes the Terminator and cant be stopped."

Bitecofer says that a Democratic nominee who is "a woman, a person of color or a Latino, or a female who is also a person of color" will drive a Democratic turnout surge in "really important places" but she thinks that even if someone as pale, male and stale as Joe Biden gets the nomination, they can still win if they pick the right running mate.

She also thinks that the Dems won't win Florida, because "Florida is really, really old," filled with conservative-leaning, Trump-forgiving "Greatest Generation" voters who "are also the nations most reliable voters." Add to them Florida's bumper-crop of "white, non-college educated voters, especially older ones," and the difficulty of mobilizing "young and/or Latino voters" for the Democratic party, and Florida is a write-off (see also: Texas, Georgia). Read the rest