The president came out fighting and experts agree he isn’t yet down for the count. The Democrats’ next choice will be vital

Rebuked if not repudiated by the American people, Donald Trump was asked an unexpected question.

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“A lot of people are going to be rushing to Iowa, rushing to New Hampshire,” a reporter began. “You know that the Democrats are already looking ahead to 2020. Do you want to lock down your ticket right now, sir? Will the vice-president be your running mate in 2020?”

The president was surprised to be put on the spot.

“Well,” he said, “I haven’t asked him but I hope so.” He looked around the crowded East Room of the White House. “Where are you? Mike, will you be my running mate? Stand up, Mike, please. Raise your right hand.”

It was like an awkward, very public, wedding proposal. Mike Pence, hardly known for his joie de vivre, had to play along. As the room erupted in laughter, he mustered a smile, stood up and half-raised his hand.

Trump asked: “Will you? Thank you, OK good. The answer is ‘Yes’. OK?”

The on-the-hoof declaration at a typically helter-skelter press conference on Wednesday seemed as fitting a way as any to draw a line under the midterm elections and look ahead to the race for the presidency.

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“That was unexpected,” Trump admitted. “But I feel very fine.”

The midterms signals were mixed. Democrats won the House of Representatives but Republicans tightened their grip on the Senate – as Trump tightened his grip on the party.

“I thought it was a very close to complete victory,” he bragged, after naming and shaming Republicans who had failed to “embrace” him. A complete victory it was self-evidently not. But it was not a complete defeat either.

“The instant analysis is clear,” Ed Rogers, a veteran of the White Houses of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, wrote in the Washington Post. “Democrats may have won the House but Trump won the election.”

The brutal truth is that Trump’s divisive rhetoric, racial dog whistles and mendacious fearmongering about a migrant caravan moving towards the US-Mexico border, which he branded an “invasion”, appears to have worked, up to a point. White men in rural areas turned out for him. Red states became redder. He demonstrated that his staggering victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was no fluke.

He tells them they matter. He tells them their votes count. They’re either forgotten or fucked Frank Luntz

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant and pollster, said: “People said he would turn off more voters, but [Trump-backed] Mike Braun in Indiana did much better than the polling had suggested. All the states that Trump went to, the numbers were better on polling day.”

The president again showed himself to be a formidable campaigner. Full of sound and fury and falsehoods, his rallies still make a visceral connection with people wanting to be part of a movement bigger than themselves. Luntz added: “He tells them they matter. He tells them their votes count. They’re either forgotten or fucked and they’ve been waiting to be told their existence matters.”

Republicans scored victories in Florida (recounts permitting), home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and close to his heart, and Ohio – two states often crucial bellwethers in a presidential election. He also noted with relish that despite Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey lending their star power, Democrat Stacey Abrams appeared to have fallen short in her bid to govern Georgia (though she has not yet conceded).

And yet beneath the banner headlines and marquee races, the picture of Trump’s impact was more complicated. An analysis by the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington found that of 75 House and Senate candidates endorsed by the president, only 21% had won their races as of noon on Wednesday, though 58% of the candidates he actively campaigned for prevailed.

Despite a strong economy, Democrats won the popular vote by more than 7% as a blue wave crashed through urban and suburban House districts. The gender gap was huge: exit polls found that white women with college degrees went Democratic 59%-39%, whereas white men with college degrees favoured Republicans 51%-47%.

Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank, said Trump had both won and lost.

“There’s a split verdict. The voters who made him came back and he maintained a 46% coalition. He lost the voters he lost two years ago in slightly bigger numbers. The Clinton coalition is strong and growing stronger, but it’s electorally inefficient. Trump has kept his minority coalition together and all he needs is a slight improvement to be assured of re-election.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nikki Haley: veep in waiting? Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) thinktank on Thursday, Olsen noted the growing percentage of women in the Democratic party and suggested: “I think it’s very likely that Donald Trump will be facing a woman. And if Donald Trump, who’s known to be ruthless to subordinates, wanted to change the odds in his favour, I think he should dump Mike Pence and select [former UN ambassador] Nikki Haley.

“The biggest thing that the Democrats continually push, and the media continually push, is that he is a racist and a sexist, and that is one of the things that weighs very heavily on the Rino- [“Republican in name only”] educated person. So you say: ‘I’ve changed America and the person who’s going to continue this is going to be a competent executive who understands foreign policy and ran her state and is a woman of colour, Nikki Haley.’ It will flummox the left.”

The 2020 election will, as usual, be subject to the whims of the electoral college, with a handful of battleground states determining who reaches the target of 270 votes. With all the advantages of incumbency, Trump may prove harder to dislodge than many on the left have hoped or expected.

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Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the AEI, said in Thursday’s panel discussion: “If you look at the House votes and project that on to a presidential election next time, Donald Trump could lose the popular vote by eight or nine million and still win the electoral college. Popular will is declining as a force in American politics. By 2040, 70% of Americans will live in 15 states, which means that 30% of Americans will elect 70 of the 100 senators.”

‘He’s in a weaker position now’

Two years ago Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton by nearly 3m ballots. His victory in the electoral college turned on just 77,000 votes in three states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In 2018, Republicans suffered major setbacks in all three, losing the governors’ races in Michigan and Wisconsin, for example. If Democrats find the right candidate to win this trifecta in 2020, Trump will almost certainly follow Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush as a one-term president.

Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who was an adviser to the Al Gore and John Kerry presidential campaigns, said: “He’s in a weaker position now. After losing the governorships in Michigan and Wisconsin, the party apparatus will atrophy to some extent. There was a mass exodus of independents and suburbanites from the Republican party because of the association with Trump. What’s going to happen when he himself is on the ballot?”

Among the known unknowns for the coming two years, there is special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. Trump fired the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, on Wednesday, but a majority in the House will give Democrats subpoena power, allowing them to go after Trump’s tax returns and make his life hell.

There was a mass exodus of independents and suburbanites from the Republican party because of the association with Trump Bob Shrum

But this could also play to the president’s advantage if he can blame Democrats for congressional deadlock and dysfunction. Once again, he will cast himself as the non-politician outsider promising to drain the Washington swamp.

Ornstein observed: “I was struck by many things in that press conference yesterday but the fact that he took Republicans who lost … and went after them and belittled them by name, says something. It says he doesn’t want to accept blame for anything and, while they would probably say Trump was a weight that pulled them down, from his perspective it was that they were not loyal enough to him.

“That tells me something about where we go from here, which is he is going to blame the Democrats in the House now for everything that goes wrong and find ways to draw those lines … If the economy starts to go down, the theme you can be sure is going to be: ‘See, when we were in charge, everything was going well and then you brought them in and look what happened.”

The tenor of Trump’s midterms campaign suggests he has abandoned any hope of bridging divides or appealing to moderates. Instead it is all about turning out the base with apocalyptic warnings of open borders and violent crime. That could provide Democrats with an opening if they avoid Clinton’s mistakes two years ago.

Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, said at the thinktank on Thursday: “It is hard to think of a state that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 that Donald Trump is likely to win in 2020. He has not made himself more attractive to a single one of the 227 electoral votes that Hillary Clinton got.

“If you add up Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and put those on top of Clinton’s states, the 2020 Democratic nominee will be the next president of the United States. So there is the cake and then the frosting. The midwest is the cake, Florida is the frosting, Georgia is a dream, and Texas, too.”

Galston added: “A crucial test for any Democratic nominee in 2020 is: what are your chances of carrying Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and if they’re good to excellent, you’re a good choice. If they’re not, you’re a terrible choice, whatever your other merits may be.

“I would pay attention to the way in which Democratic candidates in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin won. In Michigan, the winning slogan was: ‘Fix the damn roads.’ That was the bumper sticker: you can’t get more meat and potatoes. I really think there is a clear message coming out of this election: Democrats can win in the midwest, and there is a way they can do that and a way they cannot.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joe Biden campaigns in Missouri. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Following this logic, some argue that former vice-president Joe Biden, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, is ideally placed to win back blue-collar voters and go toe to toe with Trump. Others contend that a septuagenarian white man steeped in the political establishment would send precisely the wrong message at a moment when the party elected more women and people of colour than ever before.

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Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Palo Alto, California, and a former speechwriter for the Bush-Quayle re-election campaign, said: “Elections, like fashion, comes to a matter of good tailoring. This year Democrats tailored their candidates to individual races very well.

“What Democrats have to think about for 2020 is choosing a candidate who makes their heart go pit-a-pat or a candidate who who can amass 270 votes. In a nutshell, I think that’s the difference between Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden. Common sense dictates you find someone with blue-collar appeal that Joe Biden has and who is not wedded to the kind of progressive ideas that Middle America doesn’t want.”

Shrum, a politics professor at the University of Southern California, said: “It’s very early days and Biden is the clear frontrunner. He can talk the language to people that reaches them. It’s likely to be him or we move on to the next generation.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Beto O’Rourke [who ran Senator Ted Cruz surprisingly close in Texas] decided to run. He has a huge fundraising base and is one of the most natural campaigners I’ve seen for a long time.”