1. Four years ago, Trump won with a coalition of voters. While the fabled working-class whites were central to this coalition, he couldn’t have won without sizable support from suburban white women; from seniors ages 65 and older; and from independents who voted for Barack Obama in the previous election. Today, that coalition is in tatters. Trump ran competitively with college-educated white women against Hillary Clinton, losing them by 7 points; polling now suggests he could lose them by 25 points or more. Trump won seniors by 7 points against Clinton; polling now shows him consistently trailing among seniors by 5 to 15 points. Trump won independents by 4 points; polling now shows Joe Biden running up big margins with those voters. None of this means the president can’t assemble a new coalition to win this November. Indeed, his team has spent considerable time and resources targeting Hispanic voters and Black men, believing inroads with those groups could offset heavy losses elsewhere. Whether he’s successful, the fact remains: Trump’s coalition from 2016 no longer exists.

2. Four years ago, just a third of the country believed America was on the right track. These conditions were fundamentally advantageous to Trump, a political outsider, whose party had been out of power for eight years. Today, only one-fifth of the country believes America is on the right track. But this time, Trump bears the brunt of the public’s frustration, primarily due to his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic…

6. Four years ago, sluggish voter turnout allowed Trump to win the Electoral College by threadbare majorities (77,744 votes combined in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) while losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million. It was widely acknowledged that had participation been modestly higher than the roughly 137 million people who voted, Clinton would have won. Today, experts believe we could be heading for turnout in the neighborhood of 160 million votes or higher—which would roughly match the scale of record-breaking turnout in the 2018 midterms, when Democrats won the popular vote for the House by nearly 10 million votes.