I think the above map, depicting President Trump's approval rating by state, is pretty revealing. In the greenish hued states, more approve of his performance than disapprove--the darker the green, the more popular he is. I don't know what that other color is, but it's for the states where more disapprove of him than approve, and again, the darker the color the more lopsided the result. Here is a link to the map's internet home, where, by hovering over a state, you can see his exact net approval within its boundaries.
We get used to hearing in the news about "Trump's dismal approval ratings," and it's true that he's very unpopular among the American people. But "the American people" is an abstraction without a voice until polygons have been drawn around groups of them, and the most consequential polygons in this regard--think: US Senate and Electoral College--are the ones forming state boundaries. This map shows why Trump gets such a boost from the arrangement. He might be 20 points below water among "the American people," but "the American people" live in states, and, in the 50 states, the score is tied--25 for him, 25 against.
In the 2016 election, Trump carried 30 states, so one can extract from the map where the erosion has occurred. The states that he won, but in which his net approval rating is now in the negatives, are: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Utah. If you remove the electoral vote tallies of these states from Trump's 2016 winning total of 306, he lands at 248, which is 92% of the 270 needed to win. So you could say that his position has eroded to the point that he might currently be more apt to lose than win reelection. On the other hand, you could also say that his roughly 40% national approval rating has him 92% of the way to reelection: a pretty good deal for him.
And the third hand might observe that, while his position isn't as bad as you'd think, he can't withstand much more erosion. His net approval is no more than +3 in lots of big states--Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona. Meanwhile, the Great Lakes states that have turned against him have turned against him so hard that it's doubtful he can retrieve them: in Pennsylvania he's at -6, Michigan's at -10, and in Wisconsin he's -9.
Those considerations bear on his reelection prospects. After yesterday's news, a more pressing question might be whether he could survive an impeachment trial in the Senate. Conviction and removal from office requires a super-majority of two-thirds, and, as there will be 53 Republican senators, getting rid of Trump through the impeachment process would likely require at least 20 Republican votes. It seems reasonable to look first at states with Republican senators in which Trump is under water. There aren't a lot of them, but both Iowa's senators--Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst--are Republicans, and there is hardly a state where Trump's standing has fallen off more: he won Iowa by 10 points, and his net approval there is now at -10. Utah, where he's at -2, also has two Republican senators, and one of them, the freshly elected Mitt Romney, was in 2016 one of Candidate Trump's harshest Republican critics (he's since taken to sucking up to him, however). There is a very light scattering of other Republican senators representing states in which Trump's net approval is in the negatives; I believe the list is exhausted once you've named Susan Collins (Maine), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), and Cory Gardner (Colorado).
My conclusion is that Trump is being propped up by an undemocratic system that dilutes and distorts the voice of the American people. It's not a new problem, or one that was unforeseen by the founders. As I never tire of observing, my view of the question has been expressed by Alexander Hamilton, who, in Federalist Paper No. 22, wrote:
Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of Republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third.
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