https://www.inquirer.com/business/tr...-20191024.html
Excerpts from the article:
Our statistical models predict that President Donald Trump will cruise to victory — if the economy is performing a year from now as it is today, if Trump has roughly the same job approval rating, and if voter turnout is not much different from past elections.
To test the ability of these models to accurately predict future elections, we determined how well the models would have predicted elections going back to the 1980 contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Each model nails all 10 elections since then.
We’ve been predicting presidential elections since 1994 and got it right every time, except in 2016. The model we were using then incorrectly predicted that Hillary Clinton would win. In the postmortem, we figured out that our mistake was not accounting for voter turnout. We had assumed that turnout would be typical. It was anything but, as Trump got out his vote, but Clinton didn’t.
For the 2020 election, our models include voter turnout for the nonincumbent party. It turns out that predicting turnout is very hard, particularly a year away from Election Day, because turnout depends on who the candidates are and how excited voters are about them. So we don’t try. But we can determine what will happen if turnout is higher or lower than is typical for the incumbent party.
Democrats, listen up. If you want a new president in 2020, you must all vote. Indeed, the election results will swing if Democratic turnout is similar to the record turnout during Obama’s first election in 2008, when the raging financial crisis pumped up the Democrats. The extraordinary turnout by the Democrats in the 2018 midterm election certainly suggests this is doable.
Turnout is critical in three key swing states: Michigan, Wisconsin, and you guessed it, Pennsylvania. In fact, Pennsylvania will be the most critically important in determining our next president, and it boils down to only a few counties in the state, including Luzerne and Schuylkill (Wilkes-Barre and environs), and Westmoreland and Washington Counties near Pittsburgh. It’s not about whether the president or the Democratic candidate wins these counties, but about Democratic turnout in those counties. If it is high enough, it will put Pennsylvania in the Democratic column and the Democratic candidate in the White House.
All of this assumes that a year from now, the economy will be performing about as well as it is today and President Trump’s approval rating is more or less the same. But if the economy and stock market are weaker, or if the president’s low popularity is slumping further, then the Democrats’ chances of retaking the presidency are even better. And vice versa.
End of excerpts from the article.
It's just one model, and it's entirely possible that Trump fatigue will lead to greater turnout, which the model doesn't account for. But it's not a foregone conclusion.
It's up to voters, and it's unlikely that Texas voter turnout will change enough to make a difference in the presidential election. The battleground states in 2016 are much more likely to be the deciding factor.
But Texas could flip the state legislature in 2020 and undo the partisan redistricting, aka gerrymandering, that the GOP has saddled us with. This could have a huge impact on our influence in the 2024 presidential election:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...tate-blue-2020