With support for the Democrats’ impeachment effort crumbling and with his poll numbers surging in key battleground states, President Donald Trump is feeling pretty good about his chance to keep his presidential train rolling beyond 2020. One question that has been swirling around the increasingly optimistic White House, at least according to a new report, is whether or not to bother debating whichever Democrat survives the primary gauntlet — particularly because of what Trump sees as the debate commission’s biased handling of the 2016 debates.
According to The New York Times, which cites “two people familiar with the discussions,” Trump has been “discussing with his advisers the possibility of sitting out the general election debates in 2020.” The reason: “he does not trust the Commission on Presidential Debates, the nonprofit entity that sponsors the debates.”
“Less of a concern for Mr. Trump than who will emerge as the Democratic nominee is which media personality will be chosen as the debate moderator, according to people in contact with him,” the Times reports.
“At a state-of-the-race campaign briefing in Arlington, Va., the president’s advisers declined to comment on what their plan was for the debates,” the paper adds. “One senior adviser to the president seemed to wince at the question, and said it was not something advisers were prepared to discuss until next year.”
Trump’s distrust of the commission traces back to claims of being given a “defective mic” in the first debate, which ended up being a legitimate gripe: Due to an alleged “technical malfunction,” Trump’s volume during the September debate with Hillary Clinton was indeed lower than hers.
Another gripe against the commission from the Trump camp is how it handled their “surprise” invitation to a group of Bill Clinton’s accusers to the second debate. Though Trump wanted the women seated in the VIP box so Hillary would have to walk by them and could easily see them from the stage, the commission threatened to call security if they weren’t removed.
The Times also suggests that Trump is reluctant to debate his Democratic opponent because polls found that a majority of viewers believed Clinton won the debates and because she “received a bump after each of the three face-to-face matchups.”
Of course, whatever “bumps” Clinton enjoyed after the debates didn’t prove to be enough in November, when she lost in almost every battleground state, handing Trump a dominate electoral victory of 304 to 227 despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.
Trump is recently enjoying some positive trends in the polls. As The Daily Wire pointed out earlier this week, Quinnipiac, which generally presents unfavorable numbers for Trump, found that opposition to impeachment topped 50% for the first time in its poll:
Slightly more than half of all registered voters, 51 percent, think that President Trump should not be impeached and removed from office, while 45 percent say he should be impeached and removed. This compares to a November 26 poll in which 48 percent of voters said the president should not be impeached, while 45 percent said he should be. Today’s poll is the first time since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the inquiry that more than half of voters say that Trump should not be impeached.
Quinnipiac also reports some very good news for Trump on the economy:
Today, voters give the president his highest score on his handling of the economy since the question was first asked in February of 2017, with 54 percent approving of the way he’s handling the economy and 42 percent disapproving. A similar 57 percent of voters say that they are better off financially today than they were in 2016, while 22 percent say they are worse off and 19 percent volunteered that they are the same. Voter perception of the economy has improved since October, as 69 percent of voters say the state of the nation’s economy is excellent or good, while 30 percent say it is not so good or poor. In an October 23 poll, 61 percent said the economy was excellent or good, while 36 percent said it was not so good or poor.
The survey’s results follow some other positive findings for Trump from other pollsters. Firehouse Strategies found in a recent study of three crucial battleground states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — that Trump now leads all of the Democratic frontrunners in all three states, and mostly by double digits. According to the pollsters, growing opposition to impeachment is a key factor in the surge in support for the president in the states.
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