How to Predict the 2020 Presidential Winner

Ignore the buzzing commentariat on that intangible of electability. Forget even the vitriol of attacks and counter-attacks that define the modern political battlefield. And breeze through the thousands of poll numbers that will be flashed before you in coming months.

The winning candidate in 2020 will reveal himself or herself to us over the next 21 months through a basket of qualitative indicators focused on how effective each candidate is in individually appealing to likely voters in a fundamentally changed social environment.

Highly unlikely, you say? After all, we can count on one hand the serious people who correctly predicted in 2016 that Donald J. Trump would be elected president of the United States. And, if anything, 2020 feels even more wide open.

Your skepticism is warranted. But let me explain why prediction was so difficult in 2016 and why it should be easier this cycle.

Let’s start with the fact that many of us simply asked the wrong questions in 2016. We focused on candidate platforms, factualness, elite-level endorsements, and ratios of perceived gaffes to “presidential-ness.” The question most of us failed to ask and answer in a clinical way was, “What are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump doing that’s connecting with likely voters in America circa 2016?”

A second problem for prognosticators in 2016 was that we did not understand fundamental shifts in:

1.   how information was reaching voters;

2.   the problems with the quality and veracity of that information;

3.   shifts in social cohesion and search for group belonging;

4.   voters’ changing expectations of politics and politicians.

You will note that this post-mortem of 2016 is a far cry from the various anthropological treatises to explain Rustbelt voters. There’s a simple reason for that. Broad, single-point explanations for 2016—e.g., “it was an election about economic anxiety”, or “it was the politics of identity”—discount even more consequential, nationwide trends in media consumption, expectation of personalization, and social isolation. Candidate Donald Trump seemed to intuitively grasp these, while candidate Hillary Clinton seemed to miss them. It’s impossible to argue against the fact that Trump could claim unique expertise among 2016 candidates in understanding American consumer behavior—having spent decades marketing himself as a uniquely American brand—and he and his campaign parlayed that insight into politics and winning voters.

So, headed into 2020, here are the four indicators I believe will have outsize effect in deciding the winner of the election.

Social media is the message. American news consumption is increasingly fragmented between media (television, search, social media, print, and radio), while it is also increasingly concentrated in a “choose your viewpoint” battle of editorialized news and news curated by peers and professionals with shared political views. At the same time, social media—and Twitter in particular—have provided an information platform that can end-run professional media and traditional editorial controls. The ability to “go viral” and become a meme or dominant idea is demonstrably what gains candidates/incumbents and their ideas greatest exposure in this environment— “clicks and eyeballs.” This understanding of the new media landscape was undoubtedly a winning factor for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and for Donald Trump in 2016. The meteoric rise of freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the trending Green New Deal are the most recent example of how vital winning social media strategy are.

An important caveat: authenticity is vital in social media. Advertisers who have carefully studied the booming field of social media product placement warn corporate clients that younger consumers are expert at parsing what is authentic from that which is forced or contrived. Simply put, candidates are either going to themselves be very adept at social media or will need crack social media teams able to translate their “brand” and message to social media in a way that is true to who they are, lest their social media engagement prove counter-productive. The price of perceived inauthenticity will be high. Overly produced social media will be sniffed out immediately for what it is. In a shift that is authentically democratic, voters expect candidates to speak for themselves once again, bringing the message directly to voters 280 characters at a time.

Voters expect personalization. In another crossover consumer trend, voters expect increasing personalization. Micro-targeting voters using big data has been growing in importance since the mid-1990s, stoking the come-from-nowhere Howard Dean campaign in 2004, proving decisive for the winning Obama campaign in 2008, countered by a major Romney effort in 2012, key again to the Sanders insurgency campaign in 2016, and vital to Trump’s victory in 2016. Political campaigns are making use of advances popularized by the advertising industry to create advertisements that are so targeted many of us wonder whether our smartphones are actively listening to our conversations to reveal our preferences in web and other dynamic advertisements. America’s two most powerful advertising platforms, Google and Facebook, will prove critical to reaching voters. (NB: Expect that role to be heavily scrutinized: in the aftermath of the 2016 election, the role of the Cambridge Analytica firm in abusing personal data collected through Facebook became a critical issue.)

We should also expect a winning candidate in 2020 to avoid policy specifics and taking strong positions publicly, preferring instead to try to position themselves with “micro-constituencies” as much as possible on a more private, segmented basis. It’s the political dream to be able to tell each voter exactly what he or she wants to hear, and now it’s possible—and somewhat expected. Those politicians who do this most adroitly will win. And it’s not necessarily a positive agenda. Targeting the fears of voters about what opposing candidates would do in office can be an even more compelling force than that of the positive agenda of what a given candidate himself or herself would do.

Vision and big ideas capture imagination. Voters want compelling ideas that make them feel like it’s possible to move the needle on the country’s future direction. Donald Trump promised to “Make America Great Again” and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan.” This approach to policy of course drives the policy wonks wild, but voters seem to steeply discount their opinions at present. A winning candidate this round will no doubt dip into nostalgia about America’s historic achievements, link these to actual or perceived shortcomings of the moment, and hopefully fill in details about a more desirable future with a capable policy team as they sprint to the future.

Americans crave community. Harvard Sociologist Robert Putnam hit on the issue of growing social isolation for many Americans in his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. The trend is now accepted wisdom, but it has accelerated since Putnam’s book, including the fact that the fastest growing household type in the United States is adults living alone. Americans increasingly interact with each other online through a variety of platforms but see one another less—if at all—in person. That atomization even extends to work, where instead of talking or meeting in person, interactions are increasingly virtual. The central role of the political rally and the unifying element of the red “Make America Great Again” hat in the Trump campaign are emblematic of the same political meetups and sweeping speeches that defined both Obama campaigns. The ability for candidates to build community and shared identity will again prove decisive in 2020. Having the central message of a theme that unites and gets people out of their homes and in each other’s company will provide the energy to elect candidates.

Plutocrats and masses alike must be charmed. The winner of the next election will almost certainly need a stamp of approval from plutocrats and masses alike—an unlikely pairing that will prove decisive for both political parties and the eventual winning candidate. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Capital has pointed to what he calls the “two economies” of America: the top 40 percent and the bottom 60 percent. Wealth inequality in the United States unseen since the 1930s has so skewed the balance and eroded the share of the middle class that it really makes sense to look at the American electorate as living in two very different economies with very different perspectives on needs and wants. Policies must speak to the needs of both groups without alienating either. Though the plutocrats are few in number—the top one-tenth of one percent controls roughly the same resources as 90 percent of the overall population—campaign finance laws give them outsize ability to influence the course of politics. And many of the likely candidates this cycle will themselves be among this tiny elite, funding their own campaigns. At the same time, small donors have become a force in their own right and were proved critically important for Democrats in high-profile 2018 mid-term election races. A winning candidate will need to appeal to both groups to have necessary election funds and eventual votes to win.

Wildcards. Of course, there are multiple wildcards at play in this elections. Last election there were leaked emails, leaked audio tapes, and FBI directors weighing in on candidates. This time around, who knows. Among candidates this cycle are at least two more billionaires willing to again upend the finances of presidential elections—adding another layer of unpredictability in the role of possible “spoilers” who avoid the usual rules of stepping aside after the primary elections (a la Ross Perot in 1992). There’s also the small matters of multiple ongoing investigations pointing to the incumbent president’s inner circle, and possibly to the president himself. And of course, the geopolitical environment itself is a massive wildcard, from trade wars, to Vladmir Putin’s next move, to the butterfly flapping its wings to fan the next global financial crisis.

Sam Brannen leads the Risk and Foresight Group and is a senior fellow in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.