Michael Moore is back with another bold prediction. The activist filmmaker was one of the few public figures to accurately predict Donald Trump’s victory back in 2016, and now he sees an even more unbelievable possibility on the horizon: Trump could be re-elected in 2020 despite all of his mistakes and historically low approval ratings.
“I should say re-appointed, because we will have an even larger population that will vote against him in 2020,” Moore said in an interview with Fast Company as part of the promotional tour for his Broadway show, “The Terms of My Surrender.” “But he will win those electoral states as it stands now.”
Moore pointed to three swing states as key to changing the outcome: his home state of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump won all three by a mere 77,000 collective votes, though Trump also narrowly won other swing states like Florida and had surprisingly large victories in other potential swing states like Missouri.
In Moore’s view, it all comes down to swinging some of the estimated 8 million Trump voters who previously voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012.
“We just need to convince a few of them – hold out our hand and bring them back. Can we do that? I think we can do that.”
Since his prediction proved true, Moore has been incredibly active in opposing Trump, even before he took office. In February, he called for Trump’s arrest, and less than a week later, he offered up a “Trump Resistance Calendar” to help activists coordinate efforts to opposing Trump’s policies.
Additionally, Moore pointed out that more than 7 million voters supported independent candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, and he predicted there will be less openness to supporting such candidates again with the stakes being so clear in 2020 — although a new report from NBC News suggests the Democratic primary field could be historically crowded.
Back when he was predicting Trump’s shocking victory, Moore pointed to what he considered the Democratic Party’s lack of focus on disenfranchised white working-class voters. Noting that many of these voters have shown a willingness to vote for Democratic candidates like Obama and Bill Clinton, Moore said it will be up to the next Democratic nominee to clearly explain why Trump isn’t their champion.
“Maybe they were justifiably upset, angry, and hurt and whatever, and we get that,” he said. “But now they’ve seen how dangerous it is to have him as president of the United States. So I think we can bring enough people back.”
