usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What would you rate Donald Trump's *actual* chances of getting more than two full terms as U.S. president?
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1 day agoWould be difficult for him to do so via any legal means. Each individual States run elections. They are not federally run, even for federal offices per the US constitution
Election days are similarly set by the US constitution
The bar to change that is quite high with 2/3 of congress + 3/4 of state legislatures to ratify. And while Supreme Court is insane, they did recently ruled 6-3 against the insane independent state legislature theory (which would have meant even state courts could not rule on anything election related) which is related to the exact piece of the constitution
Elections are not run federally, they are run by each state which makes it harder for Republicans to be as aggressive as they’d like to be
Mind you they lost a US house seat this cycle even with Trump winning. They have just a 3 seat majority. They would need a gain of +70 seats in the house in a midterm environment to get to 2/3
On the senate side, Republicans would need to pick up 12(!) seats to get 2/3. In the 2026 map, that’s extraordinarily difficult and would require winning extremely deep blue seats. 66 senators is a lot. They would have to win literally every single senate seat up for election in 2026
Assuming they win all the solid red + lean red seats, they would need to defend both senators in North Carolina and Maine to keep 53. Then they’d have to flip the tossups of Michigan and Georgia to get to 55. Then the lean blue Minnesota senate seat to get to 56.
Then the very likely blue seats of New Mexico, Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire to get to 60. Then to get to 66, they would need to win the safe blue states of Oregon, Illinois, New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to get 66
Midterms are usually very unfavorable to the party in power. Even with more stringent voter laws, that would be a tall ask. Flipping safe blue senate senates where dems have state and local control would be insane
And you’d have to flip a large number of state legislature in deep blue states too