The man who predicted early in the 2016 campaign that Donald Trump would be elected president — and was universally laughed at — says Trump has the pieces in place to win a second term. Yes, that means we’re looking at a Trump 2020 win.
Michael Moore, the longtime progressive filmmaker and raconteur who is doing a one-man show on Broadway, says Trump has an easy track toward being re-elected. “I should say re-appointed, because we will have an even larger population that will vote against him in 2020,” says Moore in a new interview with Fast Company. “But he will win those electoral states as it stands now.”
But he says it’s not too late to flip that script, and he’s outlaid a simple agenda: Stoking activism and supporting an insurgent law that would make it happen.
Moore notes that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million and lost the election by only 77,000 votes in the Rust Belt states. “Here’s the good news: We don’t have to convince a single Trump voter to vote differently because we already have the majority,” says Moore.
In the absence of an abolition of the Electoral College — which Moore says is highly unlikely — he is advocating the National Popular Vote interstate compact, which would have states award all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote. The workaround has been approved by 10 states, including Washington, D.C.
But it needs enough states that would amount to 270 electoral votes to pass.“That’ll be an easier way to get this done,” says Moore. “People should not despair, thinking, well, the Republicans have all this power and all that. Think of the suffragettes. They were trying to get the vote for women. They got [the 19th Amendment ratified] in 35 states to give women the right to vote. Think of that uphill battle.”
“Eight million Obama voters voted for Trump. We just need to convince a few of them–hold out our hand and bring them back. Can we do that? I think we can do that,” Moore says. “You know, there were seven-and-a-half million that voted Green or Libertarian. I think we can convince a few of them to come back. We don’t need to convince a whole lot here.”
