Washington (CNN) At a meeting of White House senior staff last week, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney made a bold prediction: If the House impeaches Donald Trump, he will win 45 states in his 2020 reelection race.

Which is some kind of prediction! But could it, you know, actually happen?

Well, start here: In 2016, Trump won 30 states as well as Maine's second congressional district. (Maine apportions some of its electoral votes by House seat.) Meaning he needed to get 14 or 15 more in order to make Mulvaney look like a genius.

That's going to be VERY hard, for a few reasons.

1) Trump won six states -- Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- that Barack Obama had won in 2012. Several of those states (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin most notably) had not gone for the Republican presidential nominee in a decade or more.

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