I too saw a recent poll that showed Trump's support among self described republicans at 88%. That's high support within the party and because of it one certainly shouldn't make the mistake of counting Trump out. At the same time polls also show his support among independents has dropped significantly during the last two years. We saw this in the 2018 elections where rural areas ended up going even redder but independents in suburban districts across the country went blue in a big way. This is not good news for either Trump or the GOP.
I'm optimistic about 2020. A lot of folks voted for Trump in 2016 before he was a known political quantity because they were turned off by Hillary - who was a very well-known political quantity whom the public had seen publicly pilloried in the press for years. Now that the general electorate and the world at large has seen
Trump in action for two years they have a much better idea who they're dealing with. Approval for Trump within GOP party ranks may be as high as it can get, but that support alone is not enough to win a general election. Trump's political focus has been relentlessly aimed towards maximizing his base support and has actively avoided attempts to increase his appeal to moderates/centrists. This is likely to cost him dearly in key states (e.g. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) he needed in 2016 to pull out an electoral college win. Trump, however, is a one-trick pony and there's little reason to doubt he'll continue to engage in absurd antics that will further alienate the general electorate. Heck, right now he's shut the government down so that he can
violate a bedrock campaign promise he made dozens of times. That's not going to play well.
Also bear in mind a few other things:
- the Mueller probe appears to be nearing completion while a number of other federal investigations into the Trump campaign are also well underway. The methodology Mueller has pursued to date is entirely consistent with how prosecutors take on organized crime families. I suspect we're going to be hearing a good deal more in the near future about the sort of criminal activities directed by Trump that got all the people surrounding him cutting plea deals and/or donning orange jump suits. An essential difference now, though, will be that any allegations made by Mueller will almost certainly be made with significant supporting evidence made public. I suspect the volume of independently verified and supporting evidence will be such that it will not allow Rudy & Cheetoh any room to shift excuses/explanations/defenses as they have attempted every month or so for the past year. None of this is going to increase his appeal to the general electorate in 2020.
- the one good thing Trump had going for him, the economy, is showing multiple indications that investors are preparing for a major bear market in the near future. Investors don't like uncertainty and things like trade wars, government shutdowns, and record federal deficits - which can all be traced directly to Trump - all serve to increase that uncertainty. Regardless the cause, a downturn in the economy never bodes well for sitting Presidents.
- While Trump's support numbers currently appear to be high among self described republicans based on certain polling metrics, there has always been a significant undercurrent of resentment/mistrust towards Trump even within conservative circles - including the power base. Trump isn't really a conservative and never has been. Trump's 'base' appears to be largely ignorant of this fact, but higher information/informed conservatives are repeatedly given rude reminders of this whenever he engages in unscripted/unplanned/impromptu statements, actions and decisions. Like siding with Putin over this country's professional intelligence services, abruptly pulling out of Syria while a battle with ISIS still rages, or deploying active duty military to the border to address some non-existent 'crisis'. This sort of thing might play well with his base ("yeah, my boy Donny is really shaking things up!"), but informed conservatives see it for what it is and quietly cringe in silence while it's going on. When the going gets rough - and the future has every appearance of getting extremely rough for the President - I suspect you're going to see the fissures in the GOP widen as vulnerable Senate candidates go into survival mode and seek to distance themselves from Trump and his policies.