But at least one major indicator suggests that Trump is in fact doing less than the average Republican would do in the same circumstances – Trump does not seem to be getting the average impetus that does a duty compared to his party colleagues in the House.
The fact that Biden’s leadership is broader than the House Democrats’ edge is unusual. If it holds, it would be historic.
You would expect Trump to do better than Republicans running in the House. The simple reason is that more Democrats (or the majority party) have an advantage in the House, while Trump has the same advantage for the presidency.
Since 1940, there have been eight elections in which an official president runs for another term and his party does not control the House of Representatives. In these elections, the President has done better than the members of his party who run for the Second Chamber six or eight times (75%). The president has never underestimated his House opposition by more than 3 points in any of these years.
Of course, eight elections is not a particularly large set of elections. We can extend it to include elections where the official president did not run for another term. In these cases, we should still expect the party that controls the majority in the House to do better in House races than it does in the presidential race, because officials do it better.
If we include these elections in our group, the House-controlled party has run its party’s presidential candidate 13 of 15 times (87%) in the last 80 years.
Or put another way, the minority party in the House of Representatives has done 13 out of 15 times better in the presidential race when they control the White House if the incumbent president does not run for re-election. The vast majority of the time it is not even close.
In elections in which the minority of the House controls the White House or if a voter does not run for re-election, the Party of the minority faction did better in the presidential race with 3 points or more (round) 12 out of 15 times (80%) in the last 80 years. Trump is currently 5 points below this threshold because he is underperforming House Republicans by 2 points.
Interestingly, for most of 2020, the generic mood of Congress has remained fairly stable. Trump did better than House Republicans for most of the year, until this summer.
This suggests that Trump was won over by probably two problems: his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and race relations. The coronavirus pandemic has worsened this summer, while race relations brought the news late this spring following the assassination of George Floyd.
Maybe the good news for Trump is that if he does less than the foundations, then he has room for improvement without changing the political environment too much.
Of course, even if Trump did as well as Republican candidates for the House, he would still step down.
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